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TAKING MEN ALIVE 








TAKING MEN ALIVE 


Studies in the Principles and Practise of 
Individual Soul-Winning 


BY ve 
CHARLES GALLAUDET TRUMBULL 


“From henceforth thou shalt take men alive” 


Luke 5:10 


ASSOCIATION PRESS 


New Yorx: 347 Mapison AVENUE 


1924 





COPYRIGHT, 1907, 
BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF 
YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS. 


ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL, LONDON, 


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 


To My Father 





INTRODUCTION 


Q* the eighth of December, 1903, a great printing 
machine was awaiting a message in type that 
should carry, to the hundred thousand readers of the 
paper which it was to print, the news of the death of 
its editor. The one who, in that moment of grief 
and uncertainty, must write the message, tried to view 
the seventy-three years of life that had just closed, the 
half-century of manhood that had ministered unceas- 
ingly. The life was rich in varied and extended forms 
of service: as home missionary in Sunday-school work, 
as army chaplain, as interpreter of the Bible, as 
traveler and explorer, as preacher and speaker and 
editor, and as writer of more than thirty volumes in 
the field of character-building and spiritual truth. 
Yet in that hour when death seems to reveal the 
real man and his central power and purpose, the one 
form of ministry that stood out in clearest, whitest 
light to those who knew this man best was the minis- 
try of which the world at large, though it knew him 
well, knew least. It was his self-sacrificing service for 
the individual: his instant and invariable putting of 
the claims of one above the claims of many: his sink- 
ing and spending all that he had and all that he was 
in order to serve the one-at-a-time for whom he lived. 
And so the message that told of the earthly ending 
of his life was the message that the whole life had 
spoken; and the summons was sounded, to all who 


9 


10 Introduction 


loved him, to “make his past a success” by carrying on 
his greatest work, the winning of individuals to Christ. 
And it is significant that one of the least pretentious of 
the thirty volumes that Henry Clay Trumbull wrote is 
proving to be the most influential of them all in far- 
reaching blessing,—the little book that tells the simple 
narrative of his. “Individual Work for Individuals.” 


* ** ** 

A few months after the death of Dr. Trumbull, the 
writer was asked to conduct a class at the annual con- 
vention of the Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip, in 
the study of “Individual Work for Individuals,” on 
the basis of the experiences set down by his father in 
the volume on that subject. 

The idea of using that book as a text-book for class 
study was a new one, for it had not been written with 
just that end in view. But the wealth of material for 
study that it contained was unquestionable. So the 
experiment was tried; and every one who had a part 
in it was, apparently, surprised not only at the adapta- 
bility of the material to a classification by principles, 
but also at the definiteness and simplicity of the several 
principles which were clearly seen to be at the founda- 
tion of the success of the work that Dr. Trumbull did. 
Laymen and ministers in that summer study-class who 
had already been familiar with the contents of the little 
volume, and yet who had never sought to ascertain 
the principles of work which it does not specifically 
mention, but which it abundantly reveals, expressed 
themselves as impressed with the importance and the 
gain of this new view of the work. 

In the three years that have passed since then, the 
writer has been privileged to test the studies of that — 


Introduction Il 


summer, On more than a score of occasions, with both 
large and small audiences, in ten different states and 
provinces of North America. Sometimes but a single 
session has been devoted to the subject; again, a small 
group of students has met for three or four consecu- 
tive class sessions, ready for thorough-going investi- 
gation. In Brotherhood, Sunday-school, and Chris- 
tian Endeavor conventions, church prayer-meetings, a 
men’s guild, a university students’ Christian associa- 
tion, church congregations, and theological seminaries 
in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Tennes- 
see, the principles have been presented, worked out, 
challenged, discussed, and often unexpectedly illumi- 
nated by those who have brought their own fruitful 
experiences to bear. The material that has gone into 
the following pages is the result of these three years 
of study and conference. 

H. Clay Trumbull’s “Individual Work for Individ- 
uals” is chiefly a record of actual experiences, grouped 
by chronological periods in the life of its writer, and 
intended primarily to show what God is willing to do 
for one who seeks to improve daily opportunities of 
extending His invitation. The details of the way in 
which the work was done are given in that book in 
great fulness, but it was not the purpose of the book 
_to make a special study or presentation of the method 
back of the work,—in other words, to make a specific 
statement of the principles underlying the art. It is 
easy to miss those principles unless one specifically 
looks for them, and, missing them, to fail in the effec- 
tiveness that one might have and ought to have. The 
ascertaining, formulating, and illustrating of such prin- 
ciples is the distinctive purpose of the present studies. 


12 Introduction 


While this study of the art of “ Taking Men Alive” 
is based upon the experiences narrated in Dr. Trum- 
bull’s volume, and quotes copiously from that work in 
illustration of the various principles here set forth, yet 
the material of that volume is by no means all given 
here, and those who would realize the richness of 
God’s blessing pon consistent efforts to do this work 
will miss much if they fail to study the other book also, 
Still another work linked closely with these two in its 
study of methods of leading men into spiritual light 
is Dr. Trumbull’s “How to Deal with Doubts and 
Doubters.” It furnishes admirable supplementary 
work for a class that has completed the present studies. 

*k “e *k 

In that classic little story entitled “ Fishin’ Jimmy,” 
by a sister of Dr. Trumbull’s, Mrs. Annie Trumbull 
Slosson, the quaint old New England character whose 
life is Mrs. Slosson’s theme has convictions on the 
subject of his occupation. “To his simple intellect,” 
writes the author, “the fisherman’s art was a whole 
system of morality, a guide for everyday life, an 
education, a gospel. It was all any mortal man, 
woman, or child, needed in this world to make him or 
her happy, useful, good....And he always spoke of 
his pursuit as one speaks of something very dear, very 
sacred.” His first real interest in Christ was when 
he learned that here was “ Some One that was dreffle 
fond o’ fishin’ an’ fishermen, Some One that sot every- 
thin’ by the water, an’ useter go along by the lakes an’ 
ponds, an’ sail on ’em, an’ talk with the men that was 
fishin’. An’ how the fishermen all liked him, ’nd 
asked his ’dvice, an’ done jest’s he telled ’em about the 
likeliest places to fish; an’ how they allers ketched more 


Introduction 13 


for mindin’ him....An’ so fust thing I knowed I says 
to myself, ‘That’s the kind o’ teacher I want. If I 
could come acrost a man like that, Pd jest foller him, 
too, through thick an’ thin. ...I tell ye, his r’liging’s a 
fishin’ r’liging all through.’ ” 

Fishin’ Jimmy seemed to have the idea for which 
the Master Fisherman stood, and the phrase, “the 
art of taking men alive,’ may suggest both the method 
and the purpose of the Great Commission. The suc- 
cessful fisherman embodies the very characteristics 
which it is a duty for every soul-winner to have,— 
and that ought to mean every follower of Christ. 
Patience, knowledge of the interests of his fish, knowl- 
edge of the bait that will attract fish, faith in things 
unseen, skill, delicacy of touch, refusal to be dis- 
couraged, unlimited perseverance, conviction that he 
has not yet exhausted the possibilities of his art,—all 
these and more make the true fisherman. And it is 
important to note that not a single one of these essen- 
tials is beyond the power of any one to attain. If 
one is not a “born” fisherman, he can learn how; and 
he ought. Christ’s demands are always reasonable. 
He never enjoins the impossible without making it 
possible. 

Fishin’ Jimmy’s “wonder was never-ending that, 
in the scheme of evangelizing the world, more use was 
not made of the ‘ fishin’ side’ of the story. ‘ Haint they 
ever tried it on them poor heathen?’ he would ask 
earnestly....‘I should think ’twould ’a’ ben the fust 
thing they’d done. Fishin’ fust, aw’ rliging’s sure to 
foller? ” 


PHILADELPHIA, AUGUST 23, I907. 





CONTENTS 


The footnotes throughout the book, except when 
otherwise indicated, refer to pages in H. Clay Trum- 
bull’s “Andividual Work for Individuals.” They are 
given simply for the convenience of readers who may 
wish to locate the original passages. 

Saf 

Bible passages are usually quoted from the 

American Standard Revision. 


I. THE WORK WE ARE FACING 


Two ways in which men“are taken alive-—Three points 
to consider: the greatest work in the world; Christ’s 
preferred method; the hardest work in the world.— 
A layman’s work our basis.—Definite principles the 
secret of success.—The paradox at the heart of things: 
one more than many.—Souls seldom won by preach- 
ing.—Preachers testify to this Individual work the 
pastor’s source of power.—Christ’s preferred method 
because most effective—Seven of the eleven apostles 
so won.—Superior effectiveness of individual work 
a matter of observation—In college—In Sunday- 
school work.—In politics—-In the army.—In every 
field —The writer’s experience.—Always hard.—Never 
grows easy; never ought to.—Reasons for this 


II. THE WORKER AND HIS EQUIPMENT 


Individual work every one’s duty.—Is preliminary equip- 
ment essential?—What is individual work ?—Two 
things needed: know Christ, and know our man.— 
Jerry McAuley’s lock-step individual work.—Don’t 
wait to begin—The work not promiscuous or in- 


15 


16 Contents 


discriminate—A Northfield illustration of this——The 
only mistake to fear—The chaplain’s “mistake.”— 
A Sunday-school teacher’s “ mistake.”—Is the “pas- 
sion for souls” an essential?—Shall our own short- 
comings deter us?—The reflex uplift—The reason for 
confidence RAL rcs Yar AE coh etl 


Ill. NEED OF A LIFE-RESOLVE 


H. Clay Trumbull’s early attitude—Not won by a re- 
vival—Wondering that no one spoke to him.—His 
friend’s reluctant appeal—Reaching out after another. 
—The startling result—A life resolve—Our need of 
that resolve Me er Nr ere SS 


IV. WINNING AT THE START 


What to think of first—Knowing our man.—The secret 
of tact.—The vital need of bait—Taking men as they 
are.—Christ’s recognition of temporal interests ——Win- 
ning fishermen by fish——This point commonly missed. 
—The bait of honest commendation—The rarity of 
commendation. — Commending a _ whiskey-drinking 
traveling man—The futility of criticism—Commend- 
ing a profane Sea-captaift 7) -) 0) ean) 


V. SEEKING COMMON INTERESTS 


What is it to be saved?—Salvation in terms of the ordi- 
nary man.—Salvation a matter of present life—Bush- 
nell’s definition of faith—Seeking others’ interests 
Paul’s permanent principle—Overcoming antagonism 
in this way.—Common interests between Catholics and 
Protestants.—Putting ourselves in another’s place— 
The preacher who went to the steeple-top.— Winning 
a scientific agnostic—Sir George Williams’ oyster- 
supper tact—What interests of others may we culti- 
vate?—lIs it time wasted ?—Grenfell’s conviction Ot 


Contents 1, 


Viner PLACE OP THE BIBLE IN- THIS WORK 


The Bible our equipment.—Is it our tool?—Most unbe- 
lievers not chiefly interested in the Bible—Would 
Scripture verses have won the whiskey-drinker or the 
profane sea-captain ?—Winning others to a knowledge 
of the Bible—H. Clay Trumbull’s lifelong Bible study. 

-—His view of the use of Scripture in this work.— 
When the Bible is common meeting-ground.—Dr. 
Pentecost’s striking experience—The situation re- 
viewed Meth yet) hs eee Pee ee? cine Poet LEL 


Vi CONVICTION BELTER THANG DISCUSSION 
OR ARGUMENT 


~ Refusing to settle another’s details of duty.—Insisting that 
Christ be the guide—A big thing easier than a little 
thing—Argument to be resolutely avoided—The 
power of conviction——The minister who would not 
discuss.—How conviction got the better of argument. 
—Startling an unbeliever by refusal to bring “proofs.” 
—Refusing to admit a backslider’s sincerity.—Crip- 
pled into new life anes Sot, Ue 24. CZ eRe 26 


VIII. ENCOURAGEMENTS AND INCENTIVES 


God’s unexpected preparing of the way.—If one suspects 
our purpose beforehand ?—Rebuffs in the work almost 
unknown.—Working with those mentally deficient.— 
Two war-time incidents—Remarkable experience of 
President Browne, of Harpoot College, Turkey.—Are 
any opportunities too trifling ?—The man on the street 
corner.—The hotel drummer.—Bishop McCabe and the 
hackman.—The Pullman porter and the through ticket. 
—Danger of missing those closest to us.—The janitor 
in the theological seminary.—Nothing else a substitute 
for individual work.—Better than general prayer-meet- 
ings.—The stranger in the pew.—Shall we see results? 
—When immediate decision is a duty.—In an army 
tent at night—A Sunday night after-church crisis.— 
Jesus Christ accepts at once.—The importance of fol- 


18 Contents 


low-up work.—Henry Drummond’s student acquaint- 
ance.—Remembering another’s conditional promise . 141 


IX. HOW OUR LORD WORKED 


Working for Christ, not attempting Christ’s work.— 
Christ’s emphasis on individual work.—Seven of the 
apostles so won.—His commission to us.—Came to 
win men, not to repel—Emphasized brightness, not 
darkness.—Used the bait of present interests.—En- 
joined it upon his disciples—Used the bait of com- 
mendation.—His power in seeing merit—Building up 
faith by recognizing faith—The disciples’ mission that 
of winning, not denouncing.—Jesus sought points of 
agreement with others.—Centered men’s attention on 
their beliefs, not their doubts.—Refused proof to those 
who did not want to believe-—His use of Scripture. — 
seeking soulsvas they are =. 2. merc en ee ee 


X. THE PRINCIPLES REVIEWED 


Three distinctive truths restated—Reasons for believing 
each.— What efficiency in the work demands.—The 
only mistake to fear—Our feelings and shortcom- 
ings not factors——The life-resolve—What to concen- 
trate on as we face an opportunity.—Two effective 
kinds of bait—Making salvation interesting —Costli- 
ness of getting interested—Ignoring differences in 
creed.—Refusing to settle another man’s questions of 
duty—Twofold conviction a secret of power.—The 
Bible always our equipment, not always our tool— 
Encouragements greater than difficulties—Rights of 
the mentally deficient—No opportunity too slight— 
Our duty concerning results—The enduring purpose. 183 


INDEXES 9070 gf eS a, Ot Sir Oa 


HIN Toe lor GLASS FL EADERS 


HILE the plan of this book is such that it may 
easily be used for reading without special 
study, or again for home study by an individual alone, 
it is the hope of its publishers and author that it will 
find its widest usefulness in class use, as a text-book 
for small or large groups of persons, in the local 
church and young people’s society, in summer schools 
and assemblies, in Young Men’s Christian Associa- 
tions, in student conferences and college association 
work, and in the theological seminaries. No individual 
study of this theme can hope to compare in richness 
of result with the study that one does in a group of 
interested workers and thinkers, whose experiences and 
opinions, brought out in free, informal conference, 
are sure to stimulate all to fuller understanding, keener 
enthusiasm, and deeper conviction. 

The class group need not necessarily be large. Do 
not defer the formation of a class because there are 
“not enough.” Do not be discouraged if only a few, 
because of rain or some other such factor, attend 
a meeting which promised to be larger. The rain- 
tested few are worth more than the fair-weather many. 
It was a favorite belief—half-joking, half-serious—of 
H. Clay Trumbull’s, that in any public meeting there 
is just about so much good to go around, therefore 
the fewer there are present, the more each one is likely 
to get. A group of two or three earnest souls may 


19 


20 Hints to Class Leaders 


gain more from their study than a class of twenty 
or thirty less genuinely interested students. The small 
group always has certain advantages over the large, 
in its informality and unity of spirit, the opportunity 
of each member to take greater part in the sessions, 
and the opportunity which the leader has of coming 
close to each member. Yet if a considerable number 
is available for a class, that fact is to be welcomed, 
and a leader who is determined to be really a leader, 
mot a lecturer or preacher or other monopolist of the 
time and subject, can see to it that the large number 
does not prevent free expression by members of the 
class. 


Getting the Students to Work 


The wise and skilful leader will invariably do less 
talking than his class does. He will resolutely make 
every session a conference,—a time when the class 
members and the leader confer freely with each other 
over the problems and truths, the principles and the 
methods, that are before them for that day. An en- 
thusiastic leader may tell a class a great deal of in- 
teresting information, but if he does not get it back 
again from them, by the giving out of questions and 
opinions and experiences on their part, he will have 
taught them little or nothing. 

For thorough work, every member of the class 
will have his or her own copy of this text-book, and 
a note-book. The questions and suggestions that 
appear at the beginning and the end of every chapter 
furnish material which the leader can readily use, 
if he so desires. For example, while every member 
lof the class should, for the best results, study the 





Hints to Class Leaders 21 


“Preparatory Thoughts and Questions” that intro- 
duce each chapter (being careful to do so before read- 
ing a word of the chapter), the leader may profitably 
assign certain of these preparatory questions, in ad- 
vance, to different members, they to report upon them 
in class at the beginning of the session in which that 
chapter is to be studied. 

Thus, at the close of the session during which 
Chapter I has been studied, the leader may assign 
respectively to different students certain of the ques- 
tions that introduce Chapter II, asking them to study 
and write out their answers at home before reading 
Chapter II, and bring those answers into class with 
them at the next session. Of course, the reading of a 
chapter may materially modify or entirely reverse one’s 
preconceived opinions on a given point, but that fact 
will only make this part of the home study, and of 
the class session, the more interesting. 

Again, two members might be assigned the same 
preparatory question to report upon, so that the class 
may compare the results. Or in some instances the 
leader might ask the entire class to report on the same 
question or questions, thus insuring an interesting and 
profitable variety of views for consideration. 

The great thing is to get the student to do is own 
thinking. That is the purpose of those preparatory 
questions, and it should be the ever-present purpose 
of the true leader. It can be accomplished in number- 
less ways, some of which each leader will work out 
for himself. But unless it is accomplished, the re- 
sults of any study of this subject will fall far short 
of what they might be. 

If each member has his own book, all will read 


22 Hints to Class Leaders 


and study at home, in preparation for a lesson, such 
chapter or chapters as the leader may assign for the 
coming session of the class. The questions and topics 
at the end of each chapter will suggest to the leader 
how to test his class’s knowledge of the contents of 
that chapter. 

Urge the students to answer the questions at the 
end of the chapters, whether at home or in class, 
largely in their own words rather than in the words 
of the book, seeking to catch the ideas and principles 
presented in the book so fully that they can express 
them readily in their own language. Then they will 
have made them their own. 

It will be noted that certain of the questions or 
topics at the ends of chapters are not strictly confined 
to the contents of that chapter, but call for original 
work, and thus furnish additional material for assign- 
ing in advance for the students’ home work, when 
that is desired. 


Actual Soul-Winning Between Sessions 


The class that is content to let its study of this 
theme be purely theoretical might better not study at 
all. Every class should be a training school for ser- 
vice, and every student should be hard at work in that 
service between sessions. The most profitable feature 
of class work ought to be the study, by the class, of 
those actual experiences in individual soul-winning 
which members are having between sessions, and which 
they report in full to the class. Let the circumstances 
of such cases be carefully described, with the results 
so far as seen, and let the class discuss the special 
difficulties that characterize them, the problems in- 


Hints to Class Leaders 23 


volved, and the methods that have been or ought to 
be used in dealing with them. The class session will 
thus have a laboratory or clinical nature the value of 
which cannot be overestimated. A season of prayer for 
those yet unreached with whom present members have 
worked, and for a blessing upon the study looking 
toward the greater efficiency of the workers in this 
greatest work that Christ entrusts to men, will deepen 
and heighten the value of every moment of such study. 

The note-books should be used freely, in class and 
out, by both leader and students. Questions and points 
that occur to one in home-study should be jotted down, 
for class discussion; so with problems and difficulties 
met with in one’s personal experiences. 


Conducting a Session 

The method of conducting a session will, of course, 
be determined by every leader for himself. It is de- 
sirable, however, that each session should include the 
following features: 

Reports by students on work assigned in advance. 

A review of the principle or principles studied at 
the preceding session. 

The statement of the principle or principles under 
study that day. 

The illustration of such principle or principles, both 
out of the text-book and from the students’ or others’ 
actual experiences. 

At the close of every session, as throughout, there 
will be free discussion and ample opportunity for the 
expression of honest differences of opinion. 

If, for any reason it does not seem advisable to 
assign work to individual students in advance, the 


24 Hints to Class Leaders 


leader, instead, may devote a few minutes at the close 
of each session to an open discussion of the preparatory 
questions that introduce the chapter which is to be 
studied at the following session. This will stimulate 
interest in the coming lesson, and has the advantage of 
calling out the uninfluenced thoughts of the class on 
the principles that are to be studied later. 

Encouragé the members of the class to ask ques- 
tions freely, to tell of their own experiences and diffi- 
culties, their problems and their victories in this work. 
Let it be understood not only that they need not hesi- 
tate to interrupt the leader when he is talking, but 
that there is no such thing as an “interruption” in 
that class: that every such interruption is a contribu- 
tion to the very end for which the class exists. 


Encouraging Original Work 


Original work by the members of the class is to be 
encouraged at every opportunity. Suggest their dis- 
covering other principles of successful soul-winning, 
in addition to those given in this book, by their own 
independent study of these or other experiences. The 
author will appreciate it if both leaders and members 
of classes will have in mind his request as given on 
page 191. Particularly should original study be done 
in connection with Chapter IX, “How Our Lord 
Worked.” That chapter is not intended to be at all 
exhaustive. It only suggests how readily these prin- 
ciples of soul-winning may be tested by our Lord’s 
work and teachings. There is a wealth of opportunity 
to discover unworked material in this same line in the 
Gospels, which any class or student that is in earnest 
can well take advantage of. 


ee 


Hints to Class Leaders 25 


How Many Sesstons ? 


The number of sessions that a class devotes to the 
study of this volume need not necessarily be the 
number of chapters in the book, ten, though that offers 
a course of reasonable length. Some chapters are 
much shorter than others,—such as Chapters III, VI, 
and X,—and might be combined with other chapters 
in single lessons by those who desire to shorten the 
time of the course. If a class wished to cover the 
ground in as few as four lessons, for example, the 
following combinations of chapters would be advisable: 

Lesson I.—Chapters I, IT, III. 

Lesson If.—Chapters IV, V, VI. 

Lesson III.—Chapters VII, VIII. 

Lesson [V.—Chapters IX, X. 

A course of six lessons would consist of the follow- 
iemeonoupc mele et eee os VT OV Tima VLE ls 
ie: 

But for a class that is willing to devote ample time 
to these studies, a session of a full hour can profitably 
be given to each of the chapters (with the possible 
exception of III, which is vital but not time-consum- 
ing, and which could be joined with II), provided the 
general plan of preparation and the conduct of the ses- 
sion already outlined be carried out. 


Making It Personal 


It is often an impressive and memorable object- 
lesson, when conducting any public meeting or class 
on this subject, to ask those to rise who were won by 
a sermon or a general appeal to take the final step in 
open confession of Christ as Saviour; then to ask 


26 Hints to Class Leaders 


~ those to rise who were led to that step by the face-to- 
face, individual word of some individual.t This is 
likely, in any small group or large audience of Chris- 
tian people, to demonstrate convincingly the place of 
individual soul-winning as the great factor in the ex- 
tension of the Kingdom on earth. 


1 See pages 41-42 of this volume. 


THE WORK WE ARE FACING 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 
(For study before reading this chapter) 


What is individual soul-winning? Formulate 
your own careful definition. 

For whom is it a duty? Why? 

From your own observation, what percentage 
of church members should you say engage 
in it? 

As between minister and layman, who has the 
better opportunity to carry on this work? 

Is the greatest proficiency in the work acquired, 
Orgarelit?. 

What form of Christian service would you con- 
sider greater than this? 

To what facts and factors do you attribute the 
peculiar effectiveness of individual work? 


t 
THE WORK WE ARE FACING 


ia Jesus of Nazareth had not been a Master Fisher- 
man, the work of extending his Kingdom among 
men would have ended with his death. If we do not 
learn and practise his art of fishing, or “taking men 
alive,” we shall be failures in the chief work of his 
Kingdom on earth. 
And the fishing unto eternal life must be done indi- 
vidually. Let us therefore consider at the outset these 
three truths: 


The work of individual soul-wimning is the great- 
est work that God permits men to do. 


It was Christ's own preferred method of work, as 
it is his preferred method for us to-day. For it ts 
always the most effective way of working. 


It is the hardest work in the world to do, and it 
always will be the hardest. 


If we are not prepared to accept these statements 
as true, we shall have opportunity to investigate and 
test them as we go on with our studies. But, let us 
remember, every man in the world is going to be 
“taken alive”—by some one. The Greek zogreo, 
meaning “to take alive,” occurs only twice in the 
entire New Testament: in Luke 5:10, and 2 Timothy 
2:26. In the one case Jesus promises to enable his 


— 


Se 


: 


30 Taking Men Alive 


disciple to take men alive for the Kingdom. In the 
other case, Paul speaks of those who have been taken 
alive by the Devil. It is the same word in both cases, 
but with what a different outcome! By one or the 
other fisher of men every soul will eventually be taken, 
—taken alive unto death, or taken alive unto eternal 
life. , 

The basis of these studies will be the record of the 
experiences that one man had during fifty years of 
work as an individual soul-winner.t He seemed to 
have peculiar power and to be blessed with exceptional 
suiccess in the work. Why was this? What was the 
secret of his power? Was it a gift that can be pos- 
sessed only by a few? Or did he work in accordance 
with well-defined and plainly-recognizable principles, 
which any one may apply who is willing to pay the 
price in study and practise, and the application of 
which is as sure to bring results as the application of 
the principles of any other art? These are questions 
which it is the purpose of these studies to answer. 

For one thing, let us note that this man was a lay- 
man throughout his life, and therefore that he had no 
professional equipment such as the ordinary Christian 
worker lacks. He had the degree of D.D., to be sure, 
but that was purely honorary. He never was inside a 
theological seminary in his life, except as a visitor. 
He never even went to college. He had a rudimentary 
school education, and not much of that after fourteen 
years of age. He was put hard at work in the school 


1“ Individual Work for Individuals: a Record of Personal Expe- 
riences and Convictions.” By H. Clay Trumbull. (New York: The 
International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations.) 
The footnotes given hereafter refer to pages in that book, except when 
they refer to other sources as indicated, or to other parts of the pres- 
ent volume. 


The Work We Are Facing 31 


of life early,—and that school is open to us all. He 
worked always and only as a man among men, never 
from any vantage point of professional or pulpit posi- 
tion. Even when performing the duties of an ordained 
army chaplain, he worked as a layman rather than as a 
chaplain: 


* 


The Christian work that told [in the pres was not that 
of address to a collection of persons, but the man-to-man 
appeal of the chaplain to the single officer or soldier, when 
no one else was within sight or hearing. And this advantage 
was not because the chaplain was a chaplain, and therefore 
he had to work in a peculiar way, but it was because the 
chaplain was a man and his charge was made up of individual 
men, and his best way to deal with his men was the best way 
to deal with all men.? 

But he had a secret of success. He learned, amid 
the hard knocks of pohitical and business life, and later 
as a Sunday-school missionary and an army chaplain, 
that men are to be won in any field, whether that of 
merchandise, life-insurance, or soul-salvation, only in 
accordance with certain definite principles of man- 
winning. He had to learn what those principles were, 
or fail throughout. And he applied them to this chief 
business of life, as well as to its side-issues. 


Individual Work the Greatest Work 


? 


/ 

That individual soul-winning is the greatest work \, / 

that God calls men to do is simply part of the paradox- \ | 

principle that runs through the entire Bible. A para- 
dox is a seeming contradiction. We begin to meet it 
as soon as we begin to study the Bible. For there is 
a paradox at the very heart of things. The Way of 


1 Pages 28-29. 


Ont eee 


a2 Taking Men Alive 


Life is the great paradox of the universe. Here it is: 
Whosoever would save his life shall lose 1t; but who- 
soever shall lose his life for my sake, the same shall 
save it.1 The Man who was to win the world must 
do so by being rejected of the world. He who saves 
from death by conquering death does so by himself 
yielding to death. He that is least among you all, the 
same 1s great.” It is the sacrifice of the greater for 
the lesser, the worthy for the unworthy, the strong for 
the weak; not the loveless theory of the survival of 
the fittest, but instead the sacrifice of the fittest that 
the feeblest may survive. So it goes. The place of the 
paradox, or the seeming inversion of the natural order, 
is so firmly rooted in all our Christian life and studies 
that it needs no argument or proof. 

That one is more than many is simply in line with 
this eternal principle. You cannot reach a thousand 
unless you can reach one. The greatest preaching in 
the world is the preaching to an individual. The world 
is never going to be brought to Christ wholesale, but 
one by one. Men are not born collectively ; they do not 
die collectively; they do not accept or reject Christ 
collectively. 

But it is not yet recognized as generally as it should 
be that the leading of a single soul to Christ is rarely 
accomplished by a general or a pulpit appeal. 


It is not enough for us to cry out a message to those 
who may hear, or who may not; to those who may under- 
stand it, or who may not. We have a hearer to win as 
well as a hearer to proclaim to. As Dr. Duryea forcibly put 
it, “ The sick soul needs not a lecture on medicine, but a pre- 
scription.” Has not the ordinary method of the physician 


2 Luke 9: 24. 2 Luke 9: 48. 


The Work We Are Facing aR 


of souls been that of a lecturer rather than of a prescriber? 
Is this the proper, or the sensible way? This volume advocates 
the methods of wise personal prescription for the sick soul.! 
General preaching has its place; but it is a pre- 
liminary only in this work; the harvest must be hand- 
picked. 
A stationary fog-horn has its value on a reef, or a rocky 


shore, as a warning to those who approach the point of danger. 
We must not say that this mode of sounding an alarm has 


no value, but we cannot suppose that a fog-horn, however ~ 


clear its sound or well worked its mechanism, can fill the 
place of a coast guard of trained life-savers, who are on the 
watch to put out with their well-manned life-boat to save 
endangered single souls.? 


The strongest preachers are unhesitating in their 
conviction as to the primary importance of individual 
work. 


As a rule, the intensity of the appeal is in inverse pro- 
portion to the area covered; in other words, the greater your 
audience, the smaller the probability of your appeal coming 
home to a single heart. I once heard Henry Ward Beecher 
say, “The longer. I live, the more confidence I have in those 
sermons preached where one man is the minister and one 
man is the congregation; where there’s no question as to 
who is meant when the preacher says, ‘Thou art the man.’” 
Years after this, I heard the Rev. Dr. Nevius speak similarly 
as to the missionary field in China. He said he wanted no 
great preachers in his field. That was not the sort of mis- 
sionaries who were needed in China. If he could find a 
man who could talk familiarly, face to face, with another 
man, wherever he met him, he had missionary work for that 
kind of man in China. This is the way to do Christian work 
in China, or in America.’ 

Such a man as Mr. Moody, who thought more of how 
many individual souls he could reach than of his preaching 


1 Pages iv-v. 2 Page 152. 8 Pages 3-4. 


34 Taking Men Alive 


before any audience, however large, was always desirous of 
getting through with his preparatory pulpit appeal and of 
getting at his more important work of pleading with indi- 
vidual souls in the inquiry meeting. And that is the feeling 
of every earnest evangelist who thinks more of the work 
of reaping and harvesting than of the work of incessantly 
sowing broadcast seed that may, or that may not, have final 
fruitage.* 


It is not merely that individual work is a helpful 
addition to other work of the minister, but that it is 
the chief work, and that from it come strength and 
power for other work. Such a minister as Dr. Maltbie 
D. Babcock was a memorable witness to this truth. 
A college student wrote of him: 


Outside of our circle, little has been known of Dr. Bab- 
cock’s wonderful influence upon the lives of American stu- 
dents. Among us his work was a quiet one. Our fears, our 
hopes, our ambitions, were told him, and we were com- 
forted, advised, enthused, by him; but his lips were safe 
keepers, and our struggles were known only to him. Especially 
to the students of the [John] Hopkins University, of the 
Woman’s College, and of the other educational institutions 
of Baltimore, Dr. Babcock was a friend and adviser. To 
many, in fact, to most people, we were known as a body, as 
students of this or that institution,—to Dr. Babcock we were 
known as individuals. He knew our faces, our names, our 
peculiar experiences, and from him we each received personal 
attention.’ 

The absolute unselfishness of the man was an ever-new 
lesson, even to those who knew him best. One morning one 
of his congregation called, about nine o’clock, to see him. 
Finding him just finishing breakfast, he twitted him on being 
a late riser. 

“Come, now,” said Dr. Babcock, “I believe I was up 
earlier than you this morning.” 


3 


1 Pages 8-9. 
2From The Sunday School Times of January 4, 1902. 


The Work We Are Facing aN 


“Well, what time was it?” 

“Four o'clock,” was the reply. 

“What do you mean?” asked the astonished visitor. 

“Oh, well! I had to run out to see a sick girl who lived 
some distance off; they sent for-me,” Dr. Babcock explained. 

“Do you mean you got up at four o’clock in the morning 
to visit a sick girl who wanted to see you? Why, that’s as 
bad as being a physician!” 

“Nonsense,” said the pastor; “I’ve gotten up many a 
time earlier than that to go fishing, and been proud of it. 
Can’t I do as much for a sick girl?” 

And that put an end to the matter.1 

One afternoon he found himself in the neighborhood of a 
very large hardware store, and, remembering a number of 
articles of which he had need, entered. The clerks were prob- 
ably busy, and doubtless inattentive. He waited a few minutes, 
and no one took notice of him. Instead of going out in vexa- 
tion, or rebuking them, he stepped to a shifting-ladder on one 
side, and, mounting it, took from a box several articles he 
desired, and placed them on the counter; then rolling the 
ladder along a little, he ascended again and got other articles, 
depositing them as before. This he repeated. When getting 
them together, he sought, and at leneth secured, the attention 
of one of the clerks, who came forward, no doubt a little 
ashamed of the treatment the stranger had received, and evi- 
detitly in no very agreeable niood. 

“T want these articles. How much will they be?” 

“Two dollars and a half” (very groutily). 

“Well, you may send them to the Rev. M. D. Babcock, 
14 East Thirty-seventh Street. And, now, what is your 
name?” 

(Clerk, sulky and apprehensive) “ Bradley.” 

“ And what is your first name?” 

(Unwillingly, slowly) ‘ Charles.” 

“May I ask you one other question,—-do you go to 
shurch ? ” 

“No, I’m no church-goer.” 

(Dr. Babcock, putting his hand pleasantly on the clerk’s 


2 From The Sunday School Times of May 25, 1901. 


36 Taking Men Alive 


shoulder, and with enthusiasm) “ Now, Charlie, I want you to 
come down to my church, Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh 
Street, next Sunday. I shall preach, and I shall be real glad 
to see you. I shall have an eye out for you.” 

The next Sunday “Charlie” came with one or two of 
his friends, and the Sunday after that every clerk in the 
establishment came, and continued to come from that time. 

But for the “love” which “is not easily provoked,” and 
which “seeketh not her own,” such a result could not have 
been possible. 

“How can the church reach the masses?” Does not such 
a life as Maltbie Babcock’s give the best answer? ? 


And which would any sensible pastor and preacher 
choose for his own church if it were merely a matter 
of choice; to have great revival meetings, or to have 
every church member actively and persistently en- 
gaged in individual soul-winning seven days in the 
week all the year round? The second would insure the 
first; but the first, unfortunately, occurs without being 
followed by the second. 


Individual Work Christ’s Preferred Method 


Because this is the most effective way to win souls, 
it was Christ’s preferred method; and because it was 


‘Christ’s preferred method, it is the most effective way. 


/ Weare not told just how all the twelve disciples were 


won to Christ, but we are told how seven of them were. 
Peter, and Andrew, and James, and John, and Philip, 
and Nathanael, and Matthew, were won to Christ by 
individual work.? It is reasonable to believe that the 
method which is recorded with these seven was fol- 


2From The Sunday School Times of June 15, 1901. 
See pages 171, 177 of this volume. 





The Work We Are F acing Ru: 


lowed with some or all of the others. Christ pro- 
claimed his message by preaching, as his ministers 
must do to-day; but Christ won men and women to 
the acceptance of his message and of himself as 
Messiah and Saviour by his loving, deeply personal, 
individual evangelism—conversational evangelism it 
has been well called.’ 

Yet it is not surprising that the best method of soul- 
winning has not yet been as widely recognized as it 
deserves. 


This is so in other warfare than that of Christ with his 
foes. My experience in active service in the Civil War taught 
me, as I am sure it taught others on both sides in that conflict, 
that the thunder of artillery was likely to be most impressive, 
but that the rifles of the sharpshooters brought down more 
men. This was peculiarly the case in the siege life before 
Charleston and before Petersburg. The shriek and the crash 
of the bursting shell told in their impressiveness, especially 
upon those who were least experienced; but the quiet “hum” 
or the “whiz” of the rifle of the sharpshooter did execution 
as ten to one, or as a hundred to one, in comparison. Yet the 
artillery officer who could tell of how many rounds he had 
fired in action could boast more of his service, even if he did 
not know that he had ever hit anybody, than could the best 
sharpshooter on the whole line. So it is with those who ad- 
dress individuals for Christ. Sharpshooters may bring down 
more individuals with their telling single bullets, but they can- 
not make the impression in the surrounding atmosphere that is 
made by the big guns that are heard to thunder out from the 
pulpit casements every time they open fire.’ 


The superior effectiveness of this method of soul- 


winning is a matter of simple observation. We can 
test this ourselves, as we ask men how they were led 


1A study of our Lord’s other individual work will be found in 
Chapter IX of this volume. 


2Pages 171-172. 


38 Taking Men Alive 


to make the actual decision for Christ. And we prop- 
erly may give weight to the recorded observation of 
others. After half a century’s retrospect Dr. Trum- 
bull wrote: 


The more extensive and varied has been my experience, 
and the more I have known of the Christian labors of others, 
the more positive.is my conviction that the winning of one soul 
to Christ, or of ten thousand souls to Christ, is best done by 
the effort of an individual with an individual, not by the 
proclamation of an individual to a multitude, larger or smaller, 
without the accompanying or following face-to-face pleading 
with the single soul. 

My experience came to be varied, but in every fresh phase 
of that experience the pre-eminent value of work for one soul 
at a time, over work for a multitude of souls on the same occa- 
sion, stands out as the truth beyond challenge or question. 
This was my conviction in the first days of my Christian con- 
secration. This is my conviction to-day more positively than 
ever before. However others may feel about it, I cannot have 
a doubt on the subject. Winning one soul at a time usually 
results in the winning of a multitude of souls in the process 
of time. But addressing a multitude of souls, and urging them 
all to trust and serve Christ, may not be the means of winning 
even one soul to Christ, now or at any time.’ 


Its Effectiveness in Sunday-School Work 


Within a few weeks of my first entering Christ’s service, I 
most unexpectedly found myself summoned to superintend a 
newly organized mission Sunday-school in Hartford. In this 
way I was providentially started in the line of religious work 
that has been my chief method of Christian effort from that 
time to the present. In this, my first field of Christian work, 
I found that I could do most and best for my charge by appeal- 
ing to the individual when he and I were alone together, rather 
than by my most effective appeals from the desk, or by my 
most attractive endeavors to impress the school as a whole, 


1 Pages 24-25. 


ae 


The Work We Are Facing 39 


Occasionally, when a boy whose conduct and influence seemed 
hopelessly bad was not to be reached through anything said by 
teacher or superintendent in the presence of others, I found 
that a personal talk with him near his haunts of an evening, 
when no one else could see us, would give me a hold on him, 
so that I could lead him to a better view, and a higher esti- 
mate, of his possibilities and duties. A good superintendent 
or a good teacher will often do more for Christ and for the 
most incorrigible pupil by a half-hour’s talk with that pupil all 
by himself out of the school than is done for such a person in 
a year’s time by superintendent and teacher in the school or 
class as a whole.” 


Its Effectiveness in College 


More than thirty years ago, I was present at a meeting 
of clergymen of different denominations, where a proposition 
was being considered of inviting a well-known “ evangelist” 
to conduct a series of “revival meetings” in the community. 
Some of these clergymen criticized the methods of work and 
the manner of this evangelist. By and by a clergyman who 
was something of a sacramentarian in his views and practises, 
and therefore least likely to be in sympathy with revival 
methods, surprised all present by saying, earnestly: 

“You will understand that the public methods of this 
man, in his work, are not such as I myself should incline to; 
but I want to bear testimony to his fidelity to his Master in all 
his life course. I was his fellow-student in college. I knew 
him well there, and I can speak understandingly of his ways. 
In all the four years of his college course, no student could be 
six weeks there without having to meet squarely the question 
of his personal relations to Christ, in consequence of the loving 
and earnest appeals of that follower of Christ. I knew more 
than one who was thus influenced by him. In my own case, 
I was a skeptic when I entered college, and I had little 
thought on the subject of religion anyway. But that man’s 
appeals I had to meet, and I could not resist them. It is in 
consequence of his faithfulness that my life is given to the 


1 Pages 25-26. 


40 Taking Men Alive 


Christian ministry. And now, whatever I think of that man’s 
public Christian methods, I cannot but be grateful for his per- 
sonal fidelity to his Master and ours.” 4 


Its Effectiveness in Politics 


National politics was just then assuming more importance 
as a great moral issue, in view of the struggle over the exten- 
sion of slavery into free territory. It was about the time of 
the formation of the Republican party. I was on the stump 
for the first candidates of that party; and I was active in the 
work of canvassing for the election of those candidates. In 
this field, as in the mission Sunday-school field, I found that 
the effective political work was to be done, not in the public 
meetings, addressed by eloquent speakers, but in the quiet, sys- 
tematic searching out of the individual voter, and winning him 
to the right side. Indeed, I had the privilege of introducing 
and advocating measures for an extension of this canvassing 
for individual voters which were novel then, but which gained 
in recognition and prominence as their superior effectiveness 
was evidenced. No political campaign is won by speakers on 
the stump. Stump speeches are well enough in their way. 
They arouse enthusiasm and make voters ready to work; but 
the campaign is won by the man-to-man canvass of the indi- 
vidual voter. One man is more than a hundred in the field of 
missions or of politics. Until that thought prevails, the world 
will never be won to Christ, or to any good cause. 


Its Effectiveness in Every Field 


After my return from the army I was again in the Sun- 
day-school missionary field, which I had left to go out as a 
chaplain. For ten years I addressed gatherings of persons in 
numbers from ten or fifteen to five or six thousand each. In 
this work I went from Maine to California, and from Minne- 
sota to Florida. This gave me an opportunity to test the rela- 
tive value of speeches to gathered assemblies. Later, I have 
been for more than twenty-five years an editor of a religious | 


1 Pages 153-154. 


The Work We Are Facing Al 


periodical that has had a circulation of more than a hundred 
thousand a week during much of the time. Meanwhile I have 
published more than thirty different volumes. Yet looking 
back upon my work, in all these years, I can see more direct 
results of good through my individual efforts with individuals, 
than I can know of through all my spoken words to thousands 
upon thousands of persons in religious assemblies, or all my 
written words on the pages of periodicals or of books. And in 
this I do not think that my experience has been wholly unlike 
that of many others who have had large experience in both 
spheres of influence. 

Reaching one person at a time is the best way of reaching 
all the world in time. Reaching one person at a time is the 
best way of reaching a single individual. Therefore seeking a 
single individual is the best way of winning one person or a 
multitude to Christ. The world is made up of individuals. 
Christ longs for individuals to be in his service. Therefore 
he who considers Christ’s love, or the world’s needs, will 
think most of individuals, and will do most for individuals. 


Many of Christ’s followers do not realize that they 
themselves were won by an individual word until they 
stop to recall what it was that finally threw the balance 
in favor of their open confession of Christ. Sermons, 
general evangelistic appeals, home-training, an impres- 
sive book, Sunday-school influence, may all prepare 
the way, but the matter is seldom closed without the 
individual word to the individual. The writer, brought 
up in a Christian home and Sunday-school, did not 
realize that this was so in his own case until com- 
paratively recently, when he asked himself just what 
led to the final decision, as a boy of thirteen, to con- 
fess his Lord openly as Saviour. Then it came back 
to him. It was the word of a boy-playmate, a little 
younger than himself, who said to him one day, as 


1 Pages 27-30. 


42 Taking Men Alive 


they talked together: ‘‘ Father says that Jesus said 
that whoever would confess him before men, he would 
confess before the Father in heaven, and whoever 
denied him before men, he would deny before the 
Father in heaven." I don’t want him to deny me, and 
I’m going to join the church next communion Sunday.” 
It was not, perhaps, meant as an invitation; it was 
only a boyish but manly statement of what he was 
going to do, and why he was going to do it. But the 
reason had never before been made so plain and con- 
vincing to the other boy, who went home to talk it over 
with his parents; and at the next opportunity those 
two lads stood up together in their home church to 
confess before men their Saviour, going out together 
from that service, one to be called to his Saviour only 
three years later, the other to thank God many years 
afterward for the fidelity of the boy-friend who won 
him to Christ. 


Individual Work the Hardest Work 


Individual soul-winning is not easy work. It is 
hard. It is the hardest work that God asks us to do 
for him. Before trying to reason out why, or to argue 
that the simple extending to a fellow-man of an invita- 
tion to share with us the richest joy of our life ought 
to be an easy thing to do, let us frankly admit that it 
is hard, and face that fact to begin with. 

For any one who has ever tried the work knows 
this. Even those whose professional and only life- 
business is soul-saving find it difficult. Ask any min- 
ister-friend which is easier for him to do: to preach a 


1 Matthew 10: 32, 33. 


The Work We Are Facing 43 


sermon, or to seek an opportunity to talk alone with an 
individual about that one’s spiritual welfare. 


Many a man who is eloquent before a large congregation 
is dumb before a single individual. Such a man often con- 
fesses that he is not an effective worker in an “inquiry meet- 
ing.” Even in a season of special religious interest he wants 
to turn the work of conversing with individuals over to some- 
body else.? 

Bossuet, the great French preacher, said frankly as to this 
very matter: “It requires more faith and courage to say two 
words face to face with one single sinner, than from the pulpit 
to rebuke two or three thousand persons, ready to listen to 
everything, on condition of forgetting all.” 2 

Men who have a national and an international fame as 
preachers to a multitude actually say—not only think, but say 
—that they cannot speak to an individual soul for Christ. In 
some instances these preachers speak of it as if they counted a 
sinner’s personality too sacred to speak a word to, even to 
save his soul or to honor Christ. In other cases, they speak 
of their inability as an amiable weakness, instead of as a piti- 
able moral and spiritual defect, which proves them incompe- 
tent for their position and profession.’ 


Wil It Grow Easy ? 


If it is so hard even for the trained minister, it is 
not to be expected that laymen will do it more easily. 
But if it is our greatest work, and if it is Christ’s pre- 
ferred method because the most effective method, have 
we the satisfaction and encouragement of knowing that 
this work will grow easy as we go on in its accomplish- 
ment? Will long-continued practise bring ease and 
facility? 

It is to be hoped not. And judging from the ex- 
perience of others we are not likely to be in danger, 


1 Page 8. 2 Pages 9-10. 8 Pages 169-170. 


44 Taking Men Alive 


in this field, from the peril of easy accomplishment, 
which usually means loss of effectiveness. 

If it “takes it out’ of a man to sell goods, or write 
life insurance, or solicit advertising, or do anything 
else that means bringing another across from his 
position to ours, is there anything we ought to be 
more sharply watchful against in ourselves than slip- 
ping into a superficial “ facility ” in soul-winning? We 
not only must not expect the work to grow easy, but 
we must realize that if it does so, something is wrong. 
Anything but the “ facile’ man here! 

Dr. Trumbull was often spoken of as being a man 
of exceptional “tact.” He practised pretty constantly 
at individual soul-winning from the time when he first 
found his Saviour, at twenty-one, until his death more 
than fifty years later. People who knew him and his 
ways, and his life-long habit, have said of him, “ Oh, it 
was ‘second nature’ to Dr. Trumbull to speak to a 
man about his soul. He fairly couldn’t help doing it, it 
was so easy for him. J never could get his ease in 
the work.” And in so saying they showed how little 
they knew of him or of the demands of this work 
upon every man. 

The book on “ Individual Work ” was written after 
its author was seventy years of age. Hear what he 
had to say as to the “ease” which his long practise 
had brought him: 


From nearly half a century of such practise, as I have 
had opportunity day by day, I can say that I have spoken with 
thousands upon thousands on the subject of their spiritual 
welfare. Yet, so far from my becoming accustomed to. this 
matter, so that I can take hold of it as a matter of course, I 
find it as difficult to speak about it at the end of these years as 
at the beginning. Never to the present day can I speak toa 


The Work We Are Facing 45 


single soul for Christ without being reminded by Satan that I 
am in danger of harming the cause by introducing it just now, 
If there is one thing that Satan is sensitive about, it is the 
danger of a Christian’s harming the cause he loves by speaking 
of Christ to a needy soul. He [Satan] has more than once, 
or twice, or thrice, kept me from speaking on the subject by 
his sensitive pious caution, and he has tried a thousand times 
to do so. Therefore my experience leads me to suppose that 
he is urging other persons to try any method for souls except 
the best one. 


Have we not the answer here to the question 
which was passed over a moment ago, as to why this 
work is the hardest work in the world? Just because it 
1s the most effective work for Christ, the Devil opposes 
it most bitterly, and always will while he is permitted 
to oppose anything good. The Devil strikes hardest 
and most persistently at the forces which will, if effec- 
tive, hurt his cause most. He devotes his chief ener- 
gies to those from whom he has most to fear; their 
sides he never leaves. Therefore the worker who 
seeks to win individuals to Christ may rest assured that 
he has, by entering upon that work, served notice upon 
the Devil for a life-and-death conflict; and that 
notice will be accepted by the Devil as an obligation 
to swerve the worker from his purpose whenever, by 
any subtle means in the Devil’s power, this can be 
done. Let us write down large in our mental or real 
note-books the Devil’s favorite argument: 


His favorite argument with a believer is that just now is 
not a good time to speak on the subject. The lover of Christ 
and of souls is told that he will harm the cause he loves by 
introducing the theme of themes just now.’ 


This, then, is what we face when we enter upon 


1 Pages 168-169. 2 Page 168. 


46 Taking Men Alive 


this work. The greatest and hardest work in the 
world, it will never grow easy, but it will never grow 
small. If it always remains the hardest, it always 
remains also the greatest. There is a character-chal- 
lenge in continued difficulties that assures this work a 
quality of success to which easy work could never 
attain. 

One who was making a study of the incidents in 
Dr. Trumbull’s book started to group together first - 
those cases that seemed to be complicated by some spe- 
cial difficulty, some factor that offered a noticeable ob- 
stacle to doing individual work in that case. He put 
down one incident, and another, and another, and an- 
other. And then he gave up that plan of classifying, 
for he found that he would have to put into that first 
group practically every case in the book! In the 
record of fifty years’ work by one to whom this work 
was said to be “ easy”’ because it had become “ second- 
nature,” there was scarcely a single instance that had 
not its own peculiar obstacle or reason for holding off! 

Shall we not take encouragement by remembering 
this the next time. we are tempted to discouragement 
by the peculiar difficulties that beset our path? As 
it was in that volume, so it will be in life. There will 
seldom be an opportunity free from some strong rea- 
son why we had better “do it later.” But the Devil 
is back of the reason. 


10. 


Li: 


12. 


13. 


The Work We Are Facing 47 


Topics and Questions for Study and Discussion 


(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 


In what senses and passages is the verb “take alive” 
used in the New ‘lestament? 

What three facts may be asserted’concerning individual 
work? 

Does a minister’s professional position give him any dis- 
tinctive advantage for the doing of individual work? 
Give your reasons. 

For what reasons would you say individual soul-winning 
is the greatest work in the world? 

What was Dr. Duryea’s comment on the need of a sick 
soul? : 

Mention any preacher’s statement as to the need of in- 
dividual work, or his example in its doing. 

What striking fact in Christ’s ministry shows what im- 
portance he attached to the work? 

Why are less effective methods of Christian service likely 
to be heard from more than this most effective method 
of all? 

Describe any striking instances of individual soul-win- 
ning you have known of personally, either in your 
own or in others’ experiences, and apart from the 
cases mentioned in this book. 

How does the principle of working with individuals ap- 
ply in the Sunday-school; in college; in politics; in 
every field? 

Consider carefully whether your own actual and final 
decision to accept Christ as your Saviour was induced 
by the word of an individual to you as an individual. 
If it was, describe the circumstances and the impres- 
sion made upon you at the time. 

Have you ever known any one who claimed that it was, 
as a rule, easy for him to do individual work? If 
so, what characteristics in his work do you notice? 

Why is individual soul-winning likely to be hard work? 
Why ought it to be hard? 





THE WORKER AND HIS EQUIPMENT 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 
(For study before reading this chapter) 


What would you say is the best equipment for 
successful individual soul-winning? 

Of what should one make sure before attempt- 
ing individual work? 

Under what circumstances might one properly 
refrain from speaking to another on the sub- 
ject of personal religion? 

Are there dangers in this work? What are 
they? 

Of what mistake should we be most afraid? 

Can one who is conscious of personal defects 
and shortcomings properly undertake the 
work? 

How is equipment best to be gained? 


II 
THE WORKER AND HIS EQUIPMENT 


[> there any need to ask, now, who should do indi- 

vidual work? Can any follower of Christ accept 
Christ’s offer of salvation for himself and refuse to 
pass it on? Layman or minister, Christ knows no 
distinctions here, makes no exceptions in his Commis- 
sion to his followers. It is every layman’s chief work, 
without which every other business and accomplish- 
ment of life counts as nothing, but added to which, 
ordinary or extraordinary occupations are tenfolded 
in value and effectiveness. It is every minister’s chief 
work, without which pulpit and other labors are empty 
of life-bringing power, but added to which all his 
labors teem with life and love that are irresistible. 

But what shall we say of equipment for the work 
before one dares begin, and of the danger of doing 
harm by making serious mistakes? Shall one hold 
back for fear of doing harm? What are the essentials 
of equipment? What brings effectiveness? Shall one 
wait until he has an expert knowledge of the Bible? 
Of theology? Power in argument? Skill in discus- 
sion? 

To get a decisive answer to these questions, stop and 
consider what “ individual work” is. It is simply a tell- 
ing others of our experience of Christ’s love, so that 
they may share it. This does not call first for an ex- 


51 


isi Taking Men Alive 


pert knowledge of the contents of the Bible, or of 
theology, nor for skill in discussion and power in argu- 
ment. It does call for unshaken, unshakable know}- 
edge of what Jesus Christ has done for us, and for a 
deeply-rooted purpose to share that knowledge with 
others. 

That is all. We must know Christ, and we must know 
the one to whom we would make Christ attractive. 
There are certain ways which are more likely than 
others to win persons to us, and those ways it is the 
purpose of this book to study. But we need not hold 
off from the work even for this brief study. The best 
way to begin is to begin; and the best time to begin is 
now. 


The real question is not, “Is this the best time for a 
personal word for Christ?” but it is “ Am I willing to improve 
this time for Christ, and for a precious soul, whether it is the 
best time or not?” If the Christian waits until the sinner 
gives sign of a desire for help, or until the Christian thinks 
that a loving word to the sinner will be most timely, he is not 
likely to begin at all. The only safe rule for his guidance—if 
indeed a Christian needs a specific rule as a guide—is to speak 
lovingly of Christ and of Christ’s love for the individual when- 
ever one has an opportunity of choosing his subject of con- 
versation in an interview with an individual who may be in 
special need, yet who has given no special indication of it. 
This seems to have been Paul’s idea in his counsel to young 
Timothy: “ Preach the word; be instant in season, out of 
season; bring to the proof, rebuke, exhort, with all long- 
suffering and teaching.” The most important of all themes 
of converse would seem to be worthy of prominence in com- 
parison with others. 


Of course, this does not mean that one is to engage 
in this most subtle and vital work in a haphazard, pro- 


1 Pages 162-163. 


The Worker and His Equipment 53 


misctious way, without any reference to one’s sur- 
roundings or acquaintanceship. Dr. Trumbull drew 
the line of discrimination, as is shown in connection 
with the following incident of one of his Northfield 
visits. 


Mr. Studd and some of his Cambridge associates came 
te me, after the meeting, and asked my assistance in behalf of 
one of their countrymen who was with them. He was a young 
man standing high in his university. His father was eminent 
in the nation. Hence the influence of the young man would be 
great according as he used it for or against the right. He had, 
as yet, no interest in the Christian work that had drawn to 
Northfield some of his personal friends. He had come thither 
because of his intimacy with some of them, but he had little 
sympathy with them in their interest in what was represented 
by the Northfield Conference. They had sought in vain to win 
his interest in these things on the voyage over, and now they 
had come for my help. 

“Give us your help, Dr. Trumbull,” said Mr. Studd. “It 
would amply repay us for coming to America if we could only 
win this man to Christ.” 

“ My dear friends,” I said, “I cannot help you. I have no 
special power in winning souls. I have merely told you this 
evening of my habit of speaking a word for Christ to those 
whom God puts under my influence, or for whom, in some 
way, he gives me a responsibility. This young man is not one 
of that sort. I have merely met him here as one with you. 
All I can say is that I will have your request in mind, and if 
I meet him so that I have a right to speak to him I will not 
fail to use the opportunity.” 

“Well, we shall be praying for you and him, and I trust 
that God will open a way for a blessing.” 2 


But see what followed, when a man who was care- 
ful to observe the requirements of ordinary courtesy 
and to respect the rights of individuality was never- 


1 Pages 132-134. 


54 Taking Men Alive 


theless prayerfully watchful and hopeful that God 
would open a way. 


It was then nearly midnight. I left the Auditorium and 
went across the campus to the hall in which I had my room. 
As I went up the steps of that hall Isaw a young man standing 
in the shadow. He stepped forward to meet me. It was the 
young Cambridge student of whom we had been speaking, and 
for whom his friends and associates were now praying. As 
I greeted him cordially, he said: 

“Dr. Trumbull, I was over in the Auditorium and I heard 
your address. And now I want your help. When are you 
going away? When can I have a talk with you?” 

“T’d gladly talk to-night with you,” I said, “but I am 
not going away until to-morrow noon.” 

So it was arranged that I should meet him as I came out 
from the breakfast room early the next morning, Bidding 
him good-night, I went to my room to thank God and to pray 
to God. As I came from the breakfast room I found the 
“man greatly beloved” awaiting me. Together we sought a 
retired spot, under the trees, at some distance from the build- 
ings. There we had a plain, free talk. He was entirely ready 
to take the step of submission to Christ, and of entering his 
service. As we kneeled together in the open air, and sought 
God’s blessing on the decision then made and the new life 
course then entered on, I felt that the incident was one of 
God’s planning and leading to, and which surely had his bless- 
ing, 

I was glad to report to those who had sought my help this 
sequel to their request of the evening before. And when I left 
them all, that noon, I was confident that the new disciple 
would be lovingly and faithfully cared for and aided in the 
subsequent days at Northfield and when all returned to their 
English homes. Some weeks later I had a letter from that 
young man, speaking most gratefully of that interview under 
the trees on that morning in Northfield—that “heaven on 
earth,” as he called it, and as any place where God is can 
fairly be called. God is always better than we anticipate, if we 
are ready to work for souls in his behalf.4 


1 Pages 134-136. 


The Worker and His Equipment 55 


What Mistakes Shall We Fear ? 


A prominent preacher once sent to Dr. Trumbull, 
for publication in The Sunday School Times, an article 
on “ The Dangers of Personal Evangelism.” It was 
returned to its author unpublished. For Dr. Trumbull 
had learned early in his work that there is only one 
mistake to be really afraid of here. Of a certain ex- 
perience he wrote: 


That experience with my first young convert in the army 
encouraged me in my individual work with individuals there. 
I saw that it were better to make a mistake in one’s first effort 
at a personal religious conversation, and correct that mistake 
afterwards, than not to make any effort. There can be no 
mistake so bad, in working for an individual soul for Christ, 
as the fatal mistake of not making any honest endeavor. How 
many persons refrain from doing anything lest they should 
possibly do the wrong thing just now! Not doing is the worst 
of doing. “Inasmuch as ye did it not, depart from me,” is a 
foretold sentence of the Judge of all. 


The army experience in which he at first feared he 
had done harm was the following: 


My first experience under fire was on a winter Sunday in 
Eastern North Carolina. We had bivouacked for the night in 
an open field, when starting on a raid into the enemy’s country. 
As we rose in the early morning to make ready for a march, 
the blazing camp-fires on every side, throwing their lurid light 
on the stacked arms, and the moving soldiers, with the hum 
of conflicting voices, made a weird and impressive scene; 
and as I heard for the first time the command, to a company 
near where I stood, “Load at will,’ followed by the ring of 
the rammers in the steel rifle barrels driving home the car- 
tridges, I was thrilled by the sounds as never before. Realiz- 
ing, as I did, that when those rifles were discharged it would 
be in deadly conflict, and that before the day should close some 


1Pages 76-77. 


56 Taking Men Alive 


of the brave men near me would probably be in the presence 
of their Maker, I had a sense of responsibility for souls as 
never before, yet as often afterwards. 

Moving about among the fire-lit groups, and looking for a 
man standing by himself, I came upon a soldier, a bright Con- 
necticut boy, with whom I had often spoken in camp. He was 
arranging his belt at the moment. I spoke to him cheerily of 
the activities of the hour, and of the possibilities of the coming 
day. Then I asked him tenderly if he had committed himself 
trustfully to his Saviour. 

“Ah, Chaplain! This is no time to think of such things. 
It would unfit me for a fight if I got to thinking about myself 
just now.” 

“Tt is always a time, Sergeant, for thinking about Him 
who is able to care for us in every hour of life or of death, 
and who loves us more than we can ever love him. But if you 
don’t want to talk about this now I shall come to you when we 
are back in camp, if we get there together once more; and 
then, certainly, I can have a good talk with you about this 
matter, for I want you to do your duty.” 

Our raid was a successful one, and soon we were back in 
camp once more. I looked up my young sergeant friend, and 
told him that I had come to renew our conversation of the 
morning after our first night’s bivouac, on the recent raid. I 
had a plain, earnest talk with him. He promised to go, in need 
and trust, to his Saviour, and commit himself to him for life 
and death. After a while, when we were in St. Augustine, 
we organized a regimental church, and this young sergeant 
was the first one to stand up and make a confession of his 
Saviour, in the presence of his regimental comrades and 
others. Later he connected himself with his home church in 
Connecticut, on my certificate of his confession of faith while 
in army life in the South.2 


After a meeting at which the writer had been urg- 
ing the duty of being willing to risk mistakes rather 
than make the greatest mistake of saying nothing for 
Christ, a woman present told of her experience. She 


1Pages 73-76. 








The Worker and His Equipment 57 


had longed to lead to Christ a girl in her Sunday- 
school class. One day she called upon the girl, de- 
termined to have a loving talk about the matter. But 
her courage failed; she talked about every subject but 
the greatest one, and when she left, the purpose of her 
call had not been mentioned. She started home in dis- 
couragement ; wheeled around ; went back to the house; 
and in a blundering, faltering way she told her young 
friend how she wished she would give herself to the 
Saviour. Then the teacher left the house for the sec- 
ond time and went home, but not before the girl had 
plainly shown that she was very angry at her caller for 
what she had dared to do. At the next communion 
service of the church that young girl stood up and, 
confessing Christ as her Saviour, was received into 
full membership in the church. Her teacher went to 
her with a full heart, told her how glad she was, and 
asked her what it was that had led her to take the step. 
“Why, it was what you said to me that day you 
called,” was the reply. And one Sunday-school teacher 
was rejoiced that she had dared to make a “ mistake.” 


Our Feelings and Our Defects 


Our “feelings’”’ have no place as a factor in this 
work. What is called “the passion for souls” would 
seem to be a feeling of overwhelming desire to win 
others to Christ that very few possess or ever will 
possess. But that absence of feeling neither relieves 
us of our simple duty nor need hinder us in its doing. 
We do not have to like one before seeking to win him 
to Christ. If we saw a neighbor’s house on fire, we 
should not stop to weigh our feelings for that neighbor 
before sounding the alarm, Feelings will seldom lead 


58 Taking Men Alive 


one to the doing of this supreme duty. But both love 
and liking for a fellow-man are very likely to follow 
our unselfish efforts to bring this greatest of blessings 
to him. Our constant effort in the Christian life ought 
to be to get the better of our feelings, and not to let cur 
feelings get the better of us. 

What of the worker’s own character, or lack of 
character, as bearing on the doing of this work? 
Shall we let the consciousness of our own unworthi- 
ness, our many shortcomings, keep us from it? Shdil 
we hold off until our own lives are more nearly in ac- 
cord with the Christ-life, better examples of what 
Christ can do for one? 

Why should we? Is not our own unworthiness, 
after all, one of the chief appeals that we can make to 
those who are like us in this terrible need of a Saviour? 
We speak as saved sinners, not as superior beings. 
We know whereof we speak, for we know the need, 
and we know how great is the saving love that can 
outweigh even our unworthiness. That love of Christ 
we would share, for all need it even as we do. “ For 
we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, 
and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake....But 
we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the ex- 
ceeding greatness of the power may be of God, and 
not from ourselves.” * 

It is not so much a question of our defects, as of 
Christ’s sufficiency, nor of the difficulty in the way of 
speaking, as of our purpose to overcome such diff- 
culty. A pathetically striking instance of insistent and 
joyous determination to speak for Christ to individ- 
uals is given in S. H. Hadley’s account of Jerry 


12 Corinthians 4:5, 7- 


The Worker and His Equipment 59 


McAuley’s first efforts. While in prison Jerry had 
been won to his Saviour. 

He immediately went to work with an ardor and courage 
that would put many of us missionaries to shame. Under the 
rules of the prison at that time, very little opportunity was 
given to speak to any one. Only as they were marching to and 
fro, with lockstep, from prison to workshop, from workshop to 
_meals, and then back to prison again, could he speak to the 
man in front and the one behind, telling the burning news that 
was filling his soul, that he had found Jesus, that his sins were 
pardoned, and how happy he was in his new-found joy. 

At the table he was able to speak to the one on his right 
hand, and the one on his left, but even with this limited op- 
portiinity a wonderful revival broke out in the prison as a 
result of Jerry’s labors. Missionaries of the city went up, and 
every opportunity was given them by the management. Bible 
classes were formed of the converts, and wonderful work was 
done for God. Jerry was the center of all this activity.1 


Of this we may be sure: nothing brings into 
one’s own life such a powerful lift to higher levels as 
the doing of individual work for others. It is bound 
to raise one’s own standards of life and conduct. It 
is the most effective safeguard against personal fail- 
ure that we can ever find. The best way to conquer 
self is to forget self in an effort to help “the other 
fellow.” 

Not only will continued work in this field strengthen 
our spiritual fiber and deepen our spiritual life, but it 
will inevitably lead us into more thoughtful and profit- 
able Bible study, broaden our other interests, increase 
our sensitiveness and tact, and give us ever greater, 
power to love. Yet all these blessings to self will come 
only from a complete forgetting of self in our loving 
interest in others. 


1S, H. Hadley’s “Down in Water Street,” pages 23-24. 


60 Taking Men Alive 
Our Right to be Confident 


Finally, as to the confidence with which we enter 
upon this work. If it is the greatest work to which 
God calls us every one, can we be in any doubt as to 
its having his blessing? There is no room here for 
self-confidence; but there is no room, either, for lack 
of God-confidence. We have the same Power working 
with us that Jesus had with him. “As the Father 
hath sent me,” he says to his disciples, “ even so send 
I you.”* Results we shall not always see. But results 
we must always hope for and believe in. “ You don’t 
expect to have conversions every time you preach, do 
you?” Spurgeon is said to have asked a young min- 
ister who was seeking how to get greater results from 
his ministry. “Oh, no,” said the young man. “ Then 
you won't,” was the retort. 


Topics and Questions for Study and Discussion 


(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 


1. Why are none exempt from the obligation to do indi- 
vidual soul-winning ? 

2. What effect has the doing of this work upon one’s other 
occupations ? 

3. What is individual work, simply defined? 

4. What is not called for, in the way of equipment? What 
is called for? 

5. What two persons must we know in order to do the 
work well? 

6. How would you draw the line between haphazard, pro- 
miscuous working, and that which is not? 


1John 20: 21. 


16) 
I2. 


The Worker and His Equipment 61 


What is the only mistake that need really be feared? 

Have you ever known personally of an instance where 
the worker feared that a mistake had been made, yet 
which resulted well? Describe it. 

What place have our feelings in this work? Why? 

Should a person who is conscious of failures in his own 
life attempt this work? Why? 

What is the effect of this work upon oneself? 

Give two strong reasons why we should have confidence 
as we enter upon the work. 





NEED OF A LIFE-RESOLVE 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 
(For study before reading this chapter) 


What do you think, in general, of the wisdom of 
making pledges, or resolutions? 

Has any one a right to expect Christ to pledge 
Himself to save him, who is unwilling to 
pledge himself, in turn, to serve Christ faith- 
fully? Is this a fair way to look at the pledge 
question ? 

What statement did you make or give assent to 
when you united with the church (this can be 
obtained from your pastor)? Study this, and 
ascertain its bearing on your obligation to do 
individual work. Is it equivalent to a pledge 
to do this work? 

Frame a simple form of pledge or resolution to 
make a practise of individual soul-winning. 
What gain would there be in the definite, prayer- 

ful making of such a resolution? 


Ill 
NEED OF A LIFE-RESOLVE 


H ENRY Clay Trumbull was brought up in a home 

where exceptionally high standards prevailed, 
where both parents were earnest Christians, and where 
every influence tended Christward. Yet, as is so often 
the case in similar surroundings, he passed through 
boyhood and out of his teens without having made any 
definite confession of Christ as his Saviour. 

He left his home in Stonington, Connecticut, to 
take a clerkship in a Hartford railroad office. About 
that time there was a season of religious revival, both 
in Stonington and Hartford, with special meetings in 
the latter city under the leadership of the famous 
evangelist Finney. 


But as I was boarding at a house where the young men 
at the table had only words of contempt or ridicule for the 
whole matter, I attended none of the meetings, did not at the 
first hear Mr. Finney, and had no conscious interest in his 
work or its results.1 


Before he left Stonington, one of his most intimate 
friends there had taken the stand for Christ, and so 
had others. But no one had a word to say on the 
subject to young Trumbull. 


Had any one of them, or had any one else, spoken a per- 


1 Page 12. 


65 


66 Taking Men Alive 


sonal word to me on the subject, at that time, I would have 
welcomed it gladly; but no such word came. 

I was, indeed, somewhat surprised that my friend had no 
word to say on the subject, then or at some time later, intimate 
as he and I were. Especially was this the case as we corre- 
sponded freely during his college course in Yale. When I was 
about twenty-one years old I removed to Hartford, and I con- 
tinued to correspond freely with my Stonington friend.t 


What followed came, therefore, with the more un- 
expectedness. 


One noon, as I was returning from my mid-day meal, I 
stopped at the post-office for the noon mail. A letter came 
from my Stonington friend. This surprised me, for I had not 
yet acknowledged his letter of a few days before. As I read 
the first few lines of the letter, I saw that it was a personal 
appeal to me. At once crumpling the letter in my hand I 
thrust it into my pocket, saying to a friend who was with me, 
“T think there must be a big revival in Stonington, if it has 
set my old friend preaching to me.” Then, brushing the sub- 
ject away from my mind, I started down Asylum Street 
toward my office and my work. 

But the subject of that letter, and the letter itself, would 
not stay brushed away. I asked myself how it was that that 
letter, on that subject, had been written. In all our years of 
intimacy since my friend had come out openly for Christ, he 
had never before said or written a word on this subject. Had 
it been an easy thing for him to do now? Was it a desire for 
his own enjoyment, or a desire for my good, that had prompted 
this writing? It was worth while to read that letter, and con- 
sider its contents, before throwing it aside permanently. These 
were the thoughts that naturally ran in my mind as I walked 
toward my office. 

The office of the chief engineer, where my work lay, was 
on the third floor of one of the stone towers: of the railroad 
station. Instead of stopping in that office, where I usually 
stopped, I passed through it, and went into a little map-closet — 


1 Pages 11-12. 


Need ot a Life-Resolve 67 


on that upper floor. Shutting myself into the map-closet, where 
I could be entirely alone, I took out from my pocket the crum- 
pled letter, smoothed it out, and began with real interest to 
read. 


The letter was an earnest appeal from one man, 
who had found the Saviour, to another who did not 
yet know that joy. It opened with a half-apology for 
the seeming “ intrusion; ’’ went on to explain how hard 
it had been to write on this subject; added “I may 
never have the courage to address you again in this 
manner ;”’ and closed with the earnest hope that the 
reader would therefore “be advised by me now.” 
What a timorous, reluctant effort it was, yet how 
blessed ! 


Before I had read the last of this letter, I was on my 
knees in that corner map-room in that lofty tower sum- 
mit, asking forgiveness of God, and committing myself to a 
long slighted Saviour. That was a turning-point in my life 
course; and in a half-century that has passed since then I 
have been renewedly more and more grateful for the writing 
of that letter, and for the loving spirit that prompted it. And 
I have wished that other friends were as true to their friends.” 


The lesson of the need of individual effort for 
souls was just beginning to take root in this man’s life, 
as it was the start of his own new life. But see with 
what startling vigor the lesson was reinforced! 


So soon as I had come to the point of Christian decision 
for myself, I looked about me for another man. I did not have 
far to go. An associate with me in the office of the chief engi- 
neer was a fellow-boarder with me in the house which was my 
temporary home. We were accustomed to walk together to and 
from the boarding-house and the office. We were near each 
other all day in the office, and we sat near each other at the 


1Pages 12-14. 2 Page 17. 


68 Taking Men Alive 


boarding-house table. As we walked together from the house 
to the office, I told my friend of my new decision for Christ, 
and I urged him to make a like decision. 


Here was the answer that burned in the lesson so 
deep: 


“Trumbull, your words cut me to the heart. You little 
think how they rebuke me. I’ve long been a professed follower 
of Christ; and you have never suspected this, although we’ve 
been in close association in house and office for years. I’ve 
never said a word to you for the Saviour whom I trust. Ive 
never urged you to trust him. I’ve never said a word for him. 
And now a follower of his, and a friend of yours, from a dis- 
tance, has been the means of leading you to him. And here 
are you, inviting me to come to that Saviour of whom I have 
been a silent follower for years. May God forgive me for my 
lack of faithfulness!” 14 


Is it surprising that those two incidents in Christian 
work, one bringing him into eterna! life, the other 
revealing the careless neglect of the greatest matter in 
the world so common among Christian people, had 
an effect on this man that he determined, God helping 
him, he would never outgrow? The effect was delib- 
erately crystallized in this way: 


Then it was that I made a purpose and resolve for life. 
The purpose I formed was, as an imperative duty, not to fail 
in my Christian life in the particular way that these two 
friends of mine confessed that they had consciously failed. I 
determined that as I loved Christ, and as Christ loved souls, 
I would press Christ on the individual soul, so that none who 
were in the proper sphere of my individual responsibility or 
influence should lack the opportunity of meeting the question 
whether or not they would individually trust and follow 
Christ. The resolve I made was, that whenever I was in such 
intimacy with a soul as to be justified in choosing my subject 


1 Pages 21-22. 








Need of a Life-Resolve 69 


.af conversation, the theme of themes should have prominence 
between us, so that I might learn his need, and, if possible, 
meet it. 


There was the life-resolve that shaped and con- 
trolled that life during the more than fifty years that 
followed its prayerful making. That the efforts in 
individual soul-winning which were the direct result 
of the resolve were in every sense the richest and 
most blessed part of that long lifetime of varied ser- 
vice, Dr. Trumbull himself never doubted, nor do 
others who have had opportunity to review his life. 
Is it a resolve that any disciple of Christ ought to 
hesitate to make? Is to do so anything more than the 
meeting of our simplest duty as Christ’s loyal followers? 
But could anything bring a greater blessing, a richer 
harvest of souls, into the Kingdom to-day, than the 
making and keeping of this resolve by Christian people 
generally? Let us think of this. Here is the resolu- 
tion that we are facing: 


Whenever Iam justified in choosing my subject of 
conversation with another, the theme of themes shall 
have prominence between us, so that I may learn his 
need, and, if possible, meet it. 


Topics and Questions for Study and Discussion 


(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 


1. Why does it not necessarily follow that the influences 
of a Christian home, and of church and Sunday-school 
training, always result in one’s accepting Christ as 
Saviour? 


1 Page’ 23. 


7O 


Taking Men Alive 


What is a common cause of surprise to those who are 
not Christians, in the attitude of their Christian friends? 

Why is it that a large number of people in any com- 
munity are always unreached by revival meetings? 

How may revival meetings be given greatest effective- 
ness? 

What incident made a profound impression on H. Clay 
Trumbull just after he had been won to Christ by an 
individual appeal? 

Do you think that that experience, in his first attempt 
at soul-winning, might be duplicated in a good many 
cases to-day, or not? 

What was the life-resolve that the young convert made? 

Analyze that resolve, showing how it guards against 
haphazard or discourteous effort, under what circum- 
stances it calls for the doing of the work, why the 
resolve ought to be made, and what is its definite and 
declared purpose. 


WINNING AT THE START 


Poe Oy Gu 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 


(For study before reading this chapter) 


State the ultimate purpose of the work in which 
we are seeking to gain proficiency. 

Why, should you say, does much depend upon 
the way in which we approach a person? 

What should we try to accomplish in our ap- 
proach? 

What is the best kind of approach to make? — 

What is the worst kind of approach to make? 

Give your own definition of tact. 

What place has tact in this work? Why? 

Was Jesus tactful? Can you give any illustra-_ 
tions of his tact? 

What place has personal criticism in this work? 

Mention two or three sure ways to win people. 
to us. 


IV 
WEN NING TAT VT is GATED 


EN we are face to face with an opportunity, 
which means face to face with one whom we 
would win to Christ, how shall we begin? What 
shall we be thinking most about as we prepare to come 
into close quarters? Shall we be hunting in our mem- 
ory for a Bible text to quote? Shall we be running over 
in our mental note-book the various groups or classi- 
fications of “cases,” so that we may decide in which 
pigeon-hole this “case” belongs? Shall we try to re- 
member how this or that noted soul-winner worked? 
If we concentrate on any of these lines at: the 
moment of beginning, we shall be missing the most 
important factor in the situation. When a man is 
fishing with rod and line and fly, and is about to 
cast, what holds his chief attention then, and 
from then on? It is the fish, is it not? When a 
man is after game in the woods, and is about to ° 
attempt to bring his game down, what is the one 
thing in the world on which his eyes and thoughts 
and interests are riveted? The game itself. He must 
forget everything else in an absorbed, alert watching 
of the animal and its every movement. He must 
know his game, and its interests, if he would cap- 
ture it. 
If we would take a man alive for Christ, we must 
first of all know something, be it ever so little, about 


73 


“ 


74 Taking Men Alive 


that man and his present interests. Our knowledge 
may be gained in ten seconds; again, it may take ten 
months to gain. But we can never have this needed 
knowledge of the man, as a first step toward winning 
the man himself, unless we devote our whole energy, 
for the time being, to knowing the man. Therefore it 
is that he must fill our whole horizon as we prepare to 
come into close quarters with him. We must be 
thinking not about others, but about this other; just 
this one in the whole universe. 

This is the simple secret of “tact,’—that mysteri- 
ous power which a few favored ones seem to possess, 
and which, if one does not happen to have the “ gift,” 
is regretfully supposed to be beyond one’s reach. But 
“tact”? is simply “touch”: a touch on the right 
spot rather than the wrong; a touch which will win 
another, rather than antagonize him; a touch in keep- 
ing with, rather than opposed to, his present interests. 
_ And it is impossible to touch one at a point that will 
interest him unless we know something of what his 
interests are. The art of taking men alive calls for tact 


at the very beginning, which means, first of all, study- 


ing your man. 

This concentrating all our attention on the indi- 
vidual at the outset, so that we may know what in- 
terests him, is to enable us to put forward something 
that shall attract and hold his attention. In fishing, 
the attractive thing thus put forward by the fisher- 
man is called bait. And bait is a prime essential in the 
man-fishing to which Christ called his disciples, and in 
which he promised to train them to expertness. 

For let us bear in mind that we are in the business 
of winning men to Christ. We cannot win by antago- 


a 


Winning at the Start 75 


nizing. And we must win by drawing men to us, asa 
first step in drawing them to Christ. 


The Other Man’s Interests as Batt 


It is the other man’s interests just where they are, 
and as they are, not as we think or know they ought 
to be, that we must recognize and work with. We 
cannot expect others to cross over from their inter- 
ests to ours until we have first crossed over from our 
interests to theirs. 

The Master Fisherman has given us a striking 
instance of the use of this bait-principle, in the record 
of the training of some of his first disciples. 

-He had the whole world to choose from, when he 
began the special training of the few men with whom 
he was to entrust the continuance of the winning of the 
world to himself. Several of these chosen few were 
fishermen. That was not an accident, nor was their 
fishing a mere incident in their previous life. The 
principles of successful fishing were already dominant 
factors in their lives. And one of their earliest lessons 
in soul-winning was taught through a miraculous fisk- 
ing experience that Jesus gave them. Still more clearly 
there was no accident in this. Our study of Christ’s 
methods of winning men to himself, and our study 
of what one of his followers was permitted to do in 
the same work, reveal something of why Christ chose 
fishermen to be his apostles, and how he trained fish- 
ermen to become fishers of men. | 

Even the Son of God did not take it for granted 
that men would be interested in him or his message 
until he had first interested himself in them. Shall we 
expect to do better than he? If not, we must be will- 


76 Taking Men Alive 


ing to work as he did. Let us watch him at work 
on the lakeside.* 

He is teaching the eager multitude the word of 
God. But, always more interested in the individual 
than in the crowd, he is watching some fishermen 
near by whom he knows and whom he has been trying 
to awaken to a sense of his mission, and to the need of 
taking part in it. So he asks one of them to help by 
permitting the use of his boat as a pulpit; and then he 
goes on with his message to the multitude. 

With what indication of response or interest from 
the fishermen? None at all. The reason is plain enough. 
They had had a profitless, exhausting night of it in 
their trade. A fisherman does not mind getting tired 
out by hard work if he has a boat-load of fish to show 
for his efforts. But to work all night and take noth- 
ing! The physical exhaustion then is doubled by the 
discouragement. And the nets have to be cleaned, too, 
just as though the catch had been a big one! Washing 
nets, at its best, is pretty dull business; but washing 
nets that have stayed empty all night is enough to take 
the heart out of any man. 

It was a cheerless, discouraging day that was just 
breaking for those tired men by the sea. What if a 
great teacher was expounding precious spiritual truth 
within earshot? Human nature wanted none of that— 
just then. Could any human being fairly have been 
expected to be interested in spiritual matters under 
those circumstances? 

Jesus knew how it was. It did not call for his super- 
natural insight into “what was in man” to appreci- 
ate that the men he was trying to train were more 


1 Luke 5: 1-11. 


Winning at the Start v7) 


interested in the fish they had failed to catch, that 
morning, than in anything else in the universe. 

Yet this fact, instead of making him impatient, or 
deterring him from any attempt to go on with their 
training, was to him a challenge, an invitation. It 
was his opportunity to use tact, to use bait. He must 
touch them at the point of their present interests, un- 
worthy though these interests might seem in compari- 
son with higher spiritual matters. He must use a bait 
that would attract these men just as they were, with- 
out waiting until they should come, of their own ac- 
cord, to worthier interests. 

Fish—the fish they hadn’t caught—were their pres- 
ent interest. Fish, then, must be the bait. So his first 
word to them is, “ Put out ut) the deep, and let_down 
your nets for a_draught.” They remonstrated, of 
course. 

But because his very manner showed them that 
he was intent on giving their own temporal interests 
his supreme attention, they yielded. And then, after 
he had given them such proof of his genuine interest in 
them as they never forgot, and they had taken care 
of the nets that were breaking and the boats that were 
sinking from the draught of fishes which he had helped 
them to catch, they were ready to think of other things 
than fish. They were ready, then, to be interested in 
anything that Jesus had to. offer, because he had first 
interested himself in them. 

Now, and not until now, can Christ hope for a re- 
sponse as he says, in effect: “I have helped you to 
catch fish; I want you to help me to catch men. From 
henceforth thou shalt take men alive.” 

It is so easy to miss the principles of Christ’s meth- 


78 Taking Men Alive 


ods of soul-winning if we will not look for them. One 
of the most prominent commentators of this generation 
has actually written, of this incident: “ There was ab- 
solutely no purpose, either of demonstration of Christ’s 
mission or of help to human needs, to be served by the 
miracle. Its only significance is symbolical.” But is it, 
indeed, either necessary or reasonable to suppose that 
the Master turned aside from his spiritual teaching and 
caused the miraculous draught of fishes simply in order 
that he might have a good illustration of what he 
wanted these disciples to take up as their life-work? 
They were already fishermen; he could easily have 
said to them, with their nets empty, “ from henceforth 
thou shalt take men alive,” and they would have under- 
stood him. But the empty nets would effectually have 
killed their interest in the invitation. 

They were not interested in taking men alive then; 
they were absorbingly interested in catching fish. To 


be sure, , this was ae Lae! SO wore an interest as 


were, not as he would ve liked them to be. 


How differently most of us “would have handled — 
that situation! How we should_have stormed and— 
protested and argued with those. men, _indignantly | 
urging them to forget their fish for a few minutes and © 


turn their attention to something worth while! How 


surprised or hurt or discouraged we have been, in our — 
own experiences, because those upon whom we have — 


urged the blessings of life in Christ are obviously and 


persistently more interested in the unworthy affairs of 


this unworthy world! Have we ever given ourselves 
in any absorbing way to a study of what we are pleased © 
to consider their “ unworthy ” ipterests, in order to be 


; 
b 
3 
; 
; 
* 
k: 
i 





Winning at the Start 79 


of genuine service to them? If we have not, we are 
failing in a first principle of the art upon which de- 
pends our success in the Great Commission. 


The Batt of Honest Commendation 


We cannot do to-day just as Christ did by the lake- 
side,—work a miracle to win men’s interest. But there 
is another kind of bait that is within the reach of us 
all, and that calls for no miracle to use. It is a bait that 
Jesus himself used freely in his soul-winning.t This is 
the bait of honest commendation. It will land the most 
slippery human fish alive. No man can resist it. A 
word, heartily spoken, of sincere commendation for a 
fellow-being, will disarm opposition and draw him to 
us more effectively than any other method. It is the 
best human bait in the world. 

Perhaps one reason why honest commendation is so 
effective in challenging a person’s interest is because it 
is so rare. A friend of the writer’s, passing through a 
town on his travels, saw an old gray-haired colored 
man hard at work in the roadway. He greeted the 
toiler pleasantly: 

“Uncle, that’s a good piece of work you’re doing.” 

The old man stopped, straightened up, looked the 
other over, then said slowly: 

“Say, boss, you doan live in this town, do you?” 

“No, why?” asked the visitor. 

“T been workin’ hyar twenty years, and yo’ the fust 
man ever told me anything like that.’ Which was 
probably sober fact. . 

“But,” says some one, “that’s all well enough 
with a person whom you can commend, but suppose 


1See Chapter IX, pages 176-178, of this volume. 


80 Taking Men Alive 


you are working with one whom you can not coms 
mend?” Wait a moment! Say that again! “One 
whom you can not commend?” That person does not 
live. If we think that we have ever met such a one, 
the fault is with ourselves, not with the seemingly 
unlovely person. This truth is brought out in the 
further study of Christ’s methods,’ and it will become 
plainer as we go on in our other studies in this series. 


Commending a Whiskey-Drinker 


An illustration of the possibility and the gain of 
using honest commendation at the outset with one 
whose confidence we would win, is found in a rail- 
road train experience resulting from such an oppor- 
tunity as might come to any traveler. 


Entering, one November morning, at the Grand Central 
Station in New York, a crowded train for Boston, I found the 
only vacant seat was one alongside of a pleasant-faced, florid- 
complexioned, large-framed young man, and that seat I took, 
and began to read the morning paper. After a few minutes my 
seat-mate took from his valise a large case bottle of whiskey 
and a metal drinking-cup. Before drinking himself, he prof- 
fered it to me. As I thanked him and declined it, he drank 
by himself.’ 


Not a particularly hopeful outlook for soul-win- 
ning, most of us would feel, and still less did there 
seem to be any chance for the bait of commendation. 
But the fisherman was doing all that he could do as 
yet, by studying his man and holding himself in readi- 
ness. 


I still read my paper, but I thought of my seat-mate, and 
I watched for an opportunity. In a little while he again turned 


1In Chapter IX of this volume. 2 Pages 31-32. 





Winning at the Start St 


to his valise, and, as before, took out his whiskey bottle. Once 


ee 


As he put away the bette. after drinking from it the erat 
time, he said: 

“Don’t you ever drink, my friend?” 

“No, my friend, I do not.” 

“Well, I guess you think I’m a pretty rough fellow.” 1 


Perhaps some of us, if we had felt any responsibility 
at all for speaking a word for Christ to this seat-mate, 
would have already pointed out the danger and the 
wrong of his drinking. Or if not, we might have felt 
that he himself had now made the opening for a word 
of honest reproof, and with that we would have begun. 
Surely there was no opportunity to commend any- 
thing in this whiskey-drinking stranger. But Dr. 
Trumbull had learned the first principle of man-fish- 
ing, and here was his friendly, honest answer, based 
on the one admirable quality in this man that loving 
penetration had discovered: 


“T think you’re a very generous-hearted_ fellow.” 


And then a frank suggestion could be made in the 
same instant, because the first word had won, not re- 
pelled, the man. Even now it must be made in a 
way that should not avs by giving offense, so he 
continued : 


“But I tell you frankly I don’t think your whiskey-drink- 
ing is the best thing about you.” 


Nor did the whiskey-drinker ever live who was in 
any doubt on this point, and promptly came the 
answer: 


* Well, I don’t believe it is.” 


1Page 32. 


82 Taking Men Alive 


“ Why do you keep it up, then?” was the friendly question, 


And from that skilful, loving, winning start it was 
not difficult to have an earnest talk with this young 
fellow. 


At this he told me something of his story. He was a 
Massachusetts country boy, now a clerk in a large New York 
jobbing house. He was just going to his old country home to 
spend Thanksgiving. He confessed that he had fallen into bad 
ways in the city, very different ways from those of his boyhood 
in Massachusetts. I asked him about his mother, and he spoke 
lovingly and tenderly of her. He said he knew she was pray- 
ing for him constantly. This brought us into close quarters. 
I told him that I was sure his mother would be happy if he 
prayed for himself, and that he knew that he ought *~ do this. 
I urged him to do it. 

He was evidently surprised and touched by my expres- 
sions of interest in him. Then he spoke gratefully of another 
show of interest in him. He said: 

“TI was coming up Broadway, the other night. It was 
about midnight. I had been having ‘a time.’ Ill own up, Id 
been off on a regu'ar ‘bum.’ A little ahead of me I saw a 
fellow in a doorway, and he came out as if he were coming for 
me. I squared away towards him, as I came near him, for I 
thought he was ‘laying’ for me. But as I got opposite to him 
he just gave me a card, and asked me to accept it, and I passed 
on. 

“When I got to the next lamp-post I looked at that card, 
and it told about a place on Twenty-third Street, called a 
‘Young Men’s Christian Association,’ where they’d like to 
have young men come in any time, and make themselves at 
home. And there that fellow, that I'd squared away to, was 
out there at midnight ‘laying’ for just such ‘bummers’ as ] 
was, to invite *em to come in and make themselves at home 
in that place. I ‘swow,’ I mean to go up to that place, when I 
get back, and give ’em five dollars for the good they’re doing.” 

I told my seat-mate that those who love Christ love such 
as he, because Christ loves them. And I urged him to make 
his Thanksgiving Day at his old homestead a real day of 


— oS a 


Winning at the Start 83 


thanksgiving, by telling his good mother that her prayers for 
him were answered. 

“That would make my old mother pretty happy, if I did 
that,” he said heartily. 

“Wouldn’t you like to make your old mother happy, as 
you go home to have a Thanksgiving with her?” I asked. 

“Indeed I would,” he said. | 

As we came to my Hartford home, where I was to leave 
the train, I took his hand and urged him again to do what he 
knew was his duty, and which would gladden his good mother’s 
heart. He thanked me for my interest in his welfare. He 
promised to talk with his mother of our conversation. He 
assured me that he would endeavor to profit by our talk. I 
urged him to commit himself to Christ as the all-sufficient 
Saviour, and we parted.2 


What shall we say of denouncing another’s specific 
sin, or criticizing for some shortcoming or fault? 
Would that be a good way to begin? Would it have 
been so in the case of the whiskey-drinking seat-mate? 
Is criticism or denunciation likely to draw two people 
close together? There is grave doubt whether it ever 
does. It certainly has no place in the work of indi- 
vidual soul-winning. Christ himself did not use it 
in that work. The instances where he did use it are 
considered later.” Let us bear ever in mind that the 
first principle of this work is the drawing of men to 
us, not the driving of men away. Fishermen do not 
thrash the water or throw st stones a at the fish when they 
begin. 


Praising a Profane Sea-Captain 


Another illustration of the bait-principle of com- 
mendation, showing the importance of first winning 


3 Page> 32-35. ? {n ch’ pte. IX, page 176. of this volume. 


84 Taking Men Alive 


a man to ourselves if we would later win him to 
Christ, and illustrating the skill by which honest com- 
mendation may be made effective, is found in a war- 
time experience of the chaplain’s. 


Army-transport life gave many an opportunity of per- 
sonal work with souls, as well as did public preaching. Along 
the Atlantic coast the Civil War demanded frequent and varied 
use of transports. At one time in North Carolina our division 
made a raid into the interior of the state, cutting itself off from 
its base of supplies, and exposing itself to capture by a force 
of the enemy in its rear. It seemed, both to us and to the 
enemy, that we were hopelessly hemmed in; but, at the close 
of the day in which we had accomplished the main object of 
our raid, we turned directly toward a river, and on reaching 
its banks found a number of small vessels waiting there to re- 
ceive us, in accordance with the plan of our commanding gen- 
eral. These transports had been brought up to this point so 
that we might board them, and quietly slip down the stream 
during the night, thus flanking the force that had come into 
our rear, 

Boarding those vessels and getting under way was an ex- 
citing movement. If the enemy discovered our position in 
season to attack us before we were fairly started, there was 
little hope of escape for us. The skipper of the craft on which 
our regiment embarked was a character. He felt the responsi- 
bilities of the hour, and he gave evidence of this in his super- 
abundant profanity accompanying every order which he issued. 
I had never heard such abounding and varied oaths as he 
poured out in the half-hour from the time we began to come 
on board till we were fairly afloat and were moving down the 
stream. Of course, then was no time to begin preaching to 
him. 


That was where ordinary common sense needed to 
be used, and was. If the chaplain had attempted a 
word of personal appeal just then, the chaplain might 


1 Pages 81-82. 


7 


Winning at the Start 85 


have gone overboard. But he was none the less meas- 
uring the man, and preparing. 

I could merely watch and study him. But that I did, with 
real interest. 

When, at last, all was quiet, and the evening had come on, 
and the old skipper was evidently gratified with the success of 
the movement so far, I accosted him with complimentary 
words as to the skill and energy he had shown in his com- 
mand.1 

The bait was cast. But suppose, instead, that the 
chaplain, even now in the quiet of the evening, had 
commenced his conversation with an expression of 
regret at the skipper’s profanity, and had called his 
attention to the bad example he was setting, and the 
harmful influence he must be exerting among the 
other men, if he did not reform. How much farther, 
and with what profit, do you think that conversation 
would have gone? The bait of commendation, on the 
other hand, was readily taken, as it always is. 


This opened up a conversation, in the course of which 
he told of other exciting experiences he had had in other parts 
of the world. I listened attentively, and he saw that I was 
appreciative and sympathetic. 


To be a good listener is one of the surest ways of 
winning and holding men. The “I can help you” 
attitude is fatal in this work; the “you are helping, or 
interesting, me” spirit is one of the secrets of success. 


Presently he spoke of a particularly perilous time he once 
had on the coast of Africa. 
“Ah, Captain! I suppose you had charge of a slaver 
then,” I said. 
Seeing that he had “ given himself away,” he replied, with 
a quiet chuckle: 
1 Pages 82-83. 


86 Taking Men Alive 


“Ves, Chaplain, I’ve been up to purty nigh ev’rythin’, in 
my time, ’cept piety.” * 


Is it not remarkable how sure the “ opening ” is to 
come when we are looking and praying and planning 
for it? 

“ Well, Captain,” I responded, “ wouldn’t it be worth your 
while to try your hand at that also before you die, so as to 
make the whole round?” 

“Well, I suppose that would be fair, Chaplain.” 

The way was now open for a free and kindly talk. As 
we stood together there, on the vessel’s deck, going down 
the stream by night, we talked pleasantly and earnestly, and I 
got at the early memories of his boyhood life in New England. 
Then I knew I was near his heart.” 


There might not have seemed to be much in com- 
mon, a few hours earlier, between the young Connecti- 
cut chaplain and the weather-beaten, profane sea-cap- 
tain. But that the younger man had already succeeded 
in winning the other to himself personally, as a power- 
ful aid in winning him later to Christ, comes out in 
what happened that first night. 


By and by, all of us made ready for the night. There 
was but one berth in the cabin. That was the captain’s. Our 
officers were to sleep on the cabin floor. The captain said to 
me: 

“Chaplain, you turn in in my stateroom. There’s a good 
berth there.” - 

“No, no, thank you, Captain,” I said. “Let the Colonel 
take that.” 

“Tt isn’t the Colonel’s room; it’s mine, and I want you to 
take it.” 

“Tt would never do,” I said, “for the Colonel to sleep on 
the floor while I slept in a berth. But I thank you just as 
auch for your kindness, Captain.” 


1Page 83. 2 Pages 83-84. 


Winning at the Start 87 


I lay down with the other officers on the cabin floor. 
While I was asleep I felt myself being rolled around, and I 
found that the captain had pulled his mattress out of his berth, 
and laid it on the floor, and he was now rolling me on to it. 
I appreciated the gruff kindness of the old slaver-skipper, and 
my heart was drawn the closer to this new parishioner of 
mine. Nor did I lose my hold on him when we were fairly at 
New Berne, at the close of this trip. I was again with him in 
the waters of South Carolina, and he came again and again to 
our regimental chapel-tent on St. Helena Island to attend re- 
ligious services there. I saw that I had a hold on him. 


The most hopeful indication we can ever have in 
this work comes when one whom we would win 
shows an interest in the spiritual welfare of another. 
How the chaplain’s heart must have been gladdened at 
this sign from his skipper-parishioner ! 


One week-day he called at my tent, having a brother skip- 
per with him, whom he introduced to me, and then fell back, 
leaving us together. He joined my tent-mate, the adjutant, 
and stood watching while I talked with the new comer. He 
told the adjutant, with a string of oaths, that his foolish 
friend didn’t believe there was a God, so he'd “brought him 
over here for the chaplain to tackle.’ It was fresh evidence 
that life was stirring in him, and that therefore he wanted 
another saved.? 


Did it pay, to begin by seeking and finding some. 
thing to commend, honestly and heartily, in a cursing 
old sea-captain, and then to hold lovingly to him in the 
effort to show him his real Captain? See the end: 


When the war was over, I heard of that slaver-skipper in 
his New England seaport home. At more than threescore 
years of age he had come as a little child to be a disciple of 
Jesus; he had connected himself with the church, and was 
living a consistent Christian life. He was honestly trying his 


* Pages 84-85. 2 Page 85. 


88 


Taking Men Alive 


hand at “piety” before he died, and so was completing the 
round of life’s occupation. For this I was glad. 


yop 


12. 


13. 





Topics and Questions for Study and Discusston 


(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 


What shall we think most about as we prepare to speak 
with some one on the subject of his relation to Christ? 

What is “tact”? 

What is the immediate purpose of our seeking to know 
the man and his interests? 

Name two kinds of bait that are effective in man-fishing. 

By what method, using which kind of bait, did Jesus 
win certain disciples to the work of his Kingdom? 

Have you ever known any one whose interests were all 
and wholly unworthy? Have you ever been surprised 
to discover worthy interests in one in whom you had 
supposed they were lacking? Describe the case. 

When a person’s chief interests are wholly removed 
from, or even antagonistic to, Christ’s interests, how 
can you go about helping him? 

Have you ever tried winning an indifferent or an un- 
friendly person by commendation? Describe the case. 

What was the critical point in the conversation with 
the young whiskey-drinker in the railroad train? 

What: is the chief objection to criticism or denunciation 
in this work? 

What was apparently the single possibility of commenda- 
tion in the whiskey-drinker? In the profane sea-cap- 
tain? 

What attitude is fatal in this work? What attitude is 
sure to draw people to us? 

Why is it a duty for the soul-winner to strive to Cet 
men to himself personally,—to be liked, in other words? 


2Page 86. 


SEEKING COMMON INTERESTS 


Gta 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 


(For study before reading this chapter) 


If a worldly man whom you wanted to win 
should ask you what you meant by “veing 
saved,” what answer would you give? 

What has Christ’s salvation to do with this life 
and the affairs of this life? 

Did Christ himself emphasize chiefly men’s 
future or present need of him? Illustrate by 
Gospel passages. 

Give your own definition of saving faith. 

Should you say it is usually hard or easy to 
become interested in another’s interests? 

When you are seeking to win one whose creed 
or denominational tendencies may be quite dif- 
ferent from your own, what is your best 
course? 

Are any interests of another too trifling for us 
to utilize? How draw the line between 
worthy and unworthy interests of another? 
How far should we be willing to go in enter- 
ing into another’s activities in order to win 
him? 


V 
SEEKING COMMON INTERESTS 


A CHRISTIAN man was urging his friend to give 

himself to the Saviour. “I know you do not 
believe you can save yourself,” said the first; “do you 
know of any other Saviour than Jesus Christ ?”’ 

The man thus questioned faced his friend squarely, 
and said, “ May I ask you a question? What do you 
mean by being saved?” 

Then it was that the first speaker had to consider, 
more carefully, perhaps, than he had ever done be- 
fore, though he had from boyhood been a confessed 
follower of Christ, what he did mean by being 
“saved.” To show any vagueness or uncertainty in 
defining his belief would be disastrous, at that mo- 
ment, to his influence with the one whom he longed 
to help. Yet he believed that it would be equally 
disastrous to use “ stock phrases” with this man, who 
from his boyhood had been brought up in a Christian 
home of exceptional strictness, and who was, as he 
claimed, too familiar with conventional religious views 
and tall to be otherwise than antagonized by them. 
Other circumstances added to the difficulty. The 
man was, far beyond the average, clean-lived, mor- 
ally high-toned, honorable, aspiring, interested in the 
best things. But he was not at all sure that there is 
any life beyond the present, nor did he find the aver- 
age church or preaching of special interest to him. 

gI 


92 Taking Men Alive 


The critically important thing for the soul-winner 
to do, at this point, was to answer the honest question 
in terms of the present interests of the questioner. His 
first move was to put a counter-question. 

“Are you satisfied with yourself?” he asked. 

“ Not by a good deal,” came the unhesitating reply. 

“T knew you well enough to be sure of that,” said 
the first man. “ Have you always been able to accom- 
plish what you want to accomplish in your life?” 

“Far from it,’ was the answer. 

“Tet me tell you, then, what I mean by being 
saved,” said the one who was urging the Good Tid- 
ings. “I have never found a man yet who was satis- 
fied with himself. And I have never found any one 
who satisfied me, except Jesus Christ. I discovered 
long ago that I could not live a single day satisfactorily 
in my own strength. Christ has enabled me to come 
nearer to my best than I have ever been able to do 
alone. By being ‘saved,’ I mean saved to one’s best, 
enabled to make one’s life count for the most. That 
is what the Saviour has done for me.” 

A very inadequate and “temporal” definition of 
salvation, you say? Certainly, it was only a partial 
definition, but it was enough to set thinking in a new 
line a man who had hitherto supposed the Christian’s 
idea of salvation to be chiefly the holding of a golden 
harp, and freedom from hell fire, through’ eternity. 
Indeed, he answered at once with heartiness, “I am 
glad to hear you say that. I am glad you did not 
say anything about the next world, for, frankly, I 
haven’t any use for the regulation views of endless 
punishment and that sort of thing.” 

A little later the friend who had presented the sub- 


Seeking Common Interests 93 


ject of salvation as being something of present value 
in this present world took occasion to make clear to 
the other that he had no uncertain convictions as to 
the next world, and as to this life being only a begin- 
ning or preparation for the next. There was no argu- 
ment or discussion on this point, nor on any other. 
But it would clearly have been unwise to urge the ques- 
tion of salvation in relation to the life beyond as the 
first thing for consideration by one who had, or 
claimed to have, doubts as to a life beyond. The man 
was willing to admit his need of help in this life. From 
that as a starting-point it was well to begin. 


Making Salvation of Present Interest 


And there is a truth emphasized by this incident 
that ought to have large place in the thoughts of every 
confessed follower of Christ. Are we not too much 
inclined to relegate salvation to the next world, as a 
kind of benefit payable upon death, the definite secur- 
ing of which was finally accomplished when we stood 
up and confessed the Saviour before men, and the 
principal value of which is for another world than this? 
Our Lord said nothing about men needing him more 
after death than in present life. He did say, of 
Zaccheus, “ To-day is salvation come to this house.” 
And he added, “ For the Son of man came to seek 
and to save that which was lost,’—not “which was 
to be lost.” 

To be “ saved,” then, means that present life here 
on the earth becomes a different thing. It means 
that the disappointing struggle to which the unsaved 
are doomed in this life, and to which the exception- 
ally moral man already referred to confessed as his 


94. Taking Men Alive 


own experience, shall give way to a life of achieving 
something that brings satisfaction instead of dissatis- 
faction. It does not mean that we are going to be 
satisfied with ourselves, nor satisfied with our work. 
But it means that we have found a Person, a Saviour, 
with whom we can be satisfied, and in whose service 
assured victory, as over against continued defeat, is 
found. It means that life takes on a fulness, a rich- 
ness, an abundance, that is possible only through that 
Saviour. If one who has not accepted this salvation 
asks, “ How am I to know this? Why should I be- 
lieve it?” the answer comes from Christ’s followers 
with ringing, triumphant confidence, “We know it 
because we have tried it. You may know it for your- 
self if you will.” It is not necessary to make the serv- 
ice of Christ seem an easy thing, for itis not. But it is 
important to make the way of salvation simple. Re- 
member Bushnell’s definition of faith: ‘‘ Faith is that 
act by which one person, a sinner, commits himself 
to another Person, a Saviour.” Any one can under- 
stand that. 


Not only at the moment of approach is it important 
to be thinking of the other man’s interests in order to 
begin with them, but the principle holds throughout 
the work of soul-winning. We must not only begin 
there; we may have to stay there for a long time if we 
would exert any influence that is really to count for 
Christ. This truth is unmistakably emphasized in the 
New Testament. Not only at the beginning of the 
apostles’ ministry were others drawn to them “ because 
that every man heard them speaking in his own lan- 
guage....speaking in our tongues the mighty works 


—— ee 


Seeking Common Interests 95 


of God,” ? but Paul evidently made this a permanent 
principle of his evangelistic work: 


For though I was free from all men, I brought myself 
under bondage to ali, that I might gain the more. And*to the 
Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to them that 
are under the law, as under the law, not being myself under 
the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; to 
them that are without law, as without law, not being without 
law to God, but under law to Christ, that I might gain them 
that are without law. To the weak I became weak, that I 
might gain the weak: I am become all things to all men, that 
I may by all means save some.” 


Were not these the tactics he had in mind as he 
wrote later to the same converts: 

And I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls. 
If I love you more abundantly, am I loved:the less? But be 


it so, I did not myself burden you; but, being crafty, I caught 
you with guile? 


There is the guile, the bait, the deep-laid planning 
that Christ and Paul used and that we must learn how 
to use, most gladly spending and being spent if we 
would hope to take men alive. The work was costly 
to them; there will be little virtue in our work unless 
we make it costly to ourselves. The question is not, 
“Am I naturally interested in this person and his 
interests?” but “Am I willing to get interested?” 
For we always can if we will. 

And it is always possible to disarm antagonism 
and win confidence by this sinking of self-interests 
and deliberate cultivating of another’s interests. An 
instance of this occurred in a boarding-house experi- 
ence: 

ONO FRI ie 


21 Corinthians 9: 19-22. 3 2 Corinthians 12:15, 16. 


96 Taking Men Alive 


One winter, some time after the Civil War, I passed a 
number of weeks in a Southern city, with a young friend who 
was necessitated to be there for his health. All this time we 
were at a well-filled boarding-house. Most of the persons 
there were those whom I then met for the first time. A young 
gentleman who sat just opposite me at the table, and with 
whom I naturally came to have a speaking acquaintance, was 
a person whose habits of life and ordinary occupations were 
obviously different from mine, so that our sympathy would 
not be promoted by conferring over these. Indeed, I learned, 
from the proprietor of the house, that when he understood that 
a New England army chaplain was coming to the house as a 
boarder he wanted to leave the house on that account, and was 
only prevented from doing so by the crowded state of that 
winter resort. 

This certainly did not present an attractive opening for 
personal religious conversation. Yet I had learned that God 
gives us opportunities and responsibilities, in this line, which 
are of his choosing rather than of ours; so I waited for signs 
of God’s leading. Meantime I endeavored to show to my 
table-mate that we had things in common that were to be 
recognized and enjoyed. To win his confidence to me was a _ 
duty, if I would hope to lead him toward Christ.1 


When, after some weeks of this intercourse, the 
time came for the chaplain to leave, he realized that 
he must now or perhaps never speak the direct per- 
sonal word for which he had been trying to prepare 
the way. He reproached himself for not having done 
so earlier, yet even now he was in doubt as to whether 
he had won the man sufficiently to make his words of 
any avail. 


I spoke of the matter to my room-mate and companion, 
for whose health I was at the South. I suggested that perhaps 
it was my duty to go to the room of my fellow-boarder that 
very afternoon, and say a word to him for Christ. He might, 


1Pages 56-58. 


Seeking Common Interests 97 


indeed, take offense at it, but, again, he might not. Was it not 
worth while taking such a risk for a soul’s sake, and for 
Christ’s? The decision was made. We kneeled together in 
our room, and asked God’s blessing on my undertaking. Then 
I arose and started out. The room of my fellow-boarder and 
his wife was but just across the hall from ours. Yet it was 
not an easy task to venture on knocking at that room door, in 
the fulfilment of my purpose and my duty. 

At my knock, the young gentleman whom I sought 
opened the door, and invited me in. His wife sat on a sofa. 
They welcomed me cordially, and when I told them that I 
purposed leaving the place the next morning early, they ex- 
pressed regret, saying that our intercourse of the past few 
weeks had been very pleasant. I replied that I had enjoyed 
knowing them, and that it was because of my growing per- 
sonal interest in them that I had now called at their room. 
Then I explained that my joy in Christ’s service was the 
greatest possession of my life, and that because I longed for 
my fellow-boarders to have that joy, I had come to say so. 
The gentleman said that it was kind of me to say this, and 
that he had been thinking that he would like to know more 
about the religious belief I had, so that he might share it. 
Would I tell him what books he should read, in order to learn 
about this? 

I replied that I could mention good books for him, but 
that I should much prefer to talk on the subject with him 
personally in detail. 

“Tt would be very pleasant,’ he said, “to put myself 
under your guidance, if you would instruct me.” 

“But I leave town early to-morrow morning,” I said, 
“and I am cut off by this from helping you.” 

On his asking where I was going, and learning that I 
was to visit another part of the South, he responded that he 
would be glad to accompany me. On his asking his wife if 
that would be agreeable to her, she expressed her willingness 
to make the move, and it was arranged accordingly. Early 
the next morning the boarder who had wanted to leave tkat 
house when he found that a clergyman was coming there, 
with whom he could have no sympathy, finally left the house 
with that clergyman in order that he might be personally in- 


98 Taking Men Alive 


structed in the religion which he had come to desire as his own 
possession. Surely God was leading. And God ever leads 
those who are willing to be led, even though they often follow 
reluctantly ! 1 


But—and one may say it in all reverence—God 
himself could not have led to this result unless a child 
of his had been ready to pay the cost of studying and 
seeking another’s temporal interests, in order that, by 
guile, he might be led to higher and better things. 


Ignoring Differences of Creed 


There can be no barrier between any two men suf- 
ficient to prevent their finding common ground if only 
one of the two is determined that they shall. Least of 
all need differences of creed or faith keep men apart, 
though these are often allowed to do so. 


When God brings us alongside of one whom we may help, 
or may feel a responsibility for, we are not to consider the 
obstacles, or difficulties, in the way. God will take care of 
them. Nor are we to be hindered by religious or denomina- 
tional differences that seem to stand between us and him. The 
question is not whether he is a Roman Catholic, or a Jew, a 
Muhammadan, a Mormon, a Maronite, or an infidel. But the 
one question is, Can we evidence to him, in such a way as to 
impress on him, and to deepen his sense of their preciousness, 
the surpassing love of God and the blessed fulness of the spirit 
of Christ? We are not to risk the repelling of him by making 
prominent the things wherein we differ; but we are to ap- 
proach him at the one “ point of contact,’ that from a connec- 
tion at that point the electric current of sympathy may quiver 
to the extremities of his very being. 

In my limited experience with humanity I have had occa- 
sion to meet and converse as to personal religion with indi- 
viduals of every one of the above-named religions, or non- 


_ 


1 Pages 58-61. 


Seeking Common Interests 99 


religion, as well as with many others; and I have never found 
our differences a real barrier to our converse or to the cordial 
recognition of our real heart sympathy. “Every heart is 
human,” and God’s love is suited to the need of every human 
heart. Our duty is to follow God’s lead, nothing doubting. 

One winter Sunday morning, in a country place in Eastern 
Massachusetts, I found myself a guest in the home of the 
superintendent of a Sunday-school, at the anniversary of which 
I was to speak in the afternoon. In the forenoon of that day 
I was to address a congregation several miles from my present 
stopping-place. My host was to send me over, in his home 
team, for my forenoon appointment. Accordingly I found 
myself, that very cold day, tucked in, under a heavy robe, in 
close quarters, in the buggy, with the Irish driver. It was evi- 
dent that that man was just then the “every creature” in the 
world for me to teach the gospel to, and I had no right to 
expect a blessing on my labors for the rest of the day if I 
failed in my duty to him while on my way to my next appoint- 
ment. 

Teo begin with, I told my seat-mate whither and why I 
was going. This was to indicate my confidence in him, Then 
I said, as showing my interest in him and his standpoint: 

“You are a Catholic, I suppose?” 

“Yes, sir,’ was his reply, with a tone that seemed to indi- 
cate a conscious barrier between us. 

I at once spoke of several Roman Catholic bishops and 
priests with whom I was intimate, and whom I valued, and 
then asked: 

“Have you a Catholic Church in the village?”—which we 
had just left. 

“There is no church there yet, sir. But a priest comes 
over once in four weeks, and says mass.” 

“When is the next time for his coming?” I asked. 

“ He’s there to-day, sir.” 

“Then I’m keeping you away from mass. How sorry I 
am for this!” 

“Oh! it’s all right, sir. I’m glad to go with you, sir.” 

We were on the same plane by this time. It was now my 
duty to improve this advantage. And I began: 

“You say youre a Catholic; are you a good Catholic? 


100 Taking Men Alive 


Do you honestly love God, and trust your blessed Saviour, as 
you are taught, by your church, is your duty?” 

“Tm afraid I’m not a good Catholic, sir. Pm afraid I do 
not do my duty.” 

What better start could you ask for an earnest talk with a 
nominal Protestant, if he were known to be cold and indiffer- 
ent, or a backslider, and you wanted to arouse him to deep and © 
intense feeling in-the truth of truths? At this starting-point I 
pressed home the truth: 

“My friend, when we think of what the blessed Jesus did 
for us, how he left his glorious home in heaven, and became 
a babe in a manger to begin with, and then toiled on here and 
suffered for years, and was despised and rejected of men, and 
was crucified and died, in proof of his love for us, and of his 
Father’s love, in order that we can be saved, is it asking or 
expecting too much of us that we should show our gratitude in 
the little things that Christ asks of us?” 

ONO, Sit, itis fot. + 

And of this sacred theme we talked together pleasantly, 
on that carriage seat, that Sunday morning, until we reached 
our destination. My new host, a clergyman, welcomed me to 
his home, while he directed the driver, with his horse, to the 
stable. On entering the parsonage, I said to the pastor that, 
as the day was very cold, I should be glad to have the driver 
invited into the kitchen out of the cold. Accordingly, he went 
to the barn to invite the man in. Returning, the pastor told me 
that the man said he wished to go to church to hear the gentle- 
man preach that he had just brought over. 

As I rose in the pulpit, I saw my seat-mate of the morn- 
ing facing me in a pew. What he had heard from me about 
his Saviour, and about his duty to that Saviour, had apparently 
sharpened his appetite for more. I confess that some of the 
words of my address that morning were for that one hearer, 
rather than for the body of the congregation. Then, as at 
many times before and since, one person was more to me than 
many persons. As, at noon, we drove back together, our con- 
versation was again on the theme of themes, with fresh com- 
ments on phases of it about which I had talked, in his hearing, 
from the pulpit. 

On thinking the day’s work over at its close, I realized, 


Seeking Common Interests Ol 


not that a Protestant and a Roman Catholic had found much 
that they could talk about together to their mutual spiritual 
profit, but that we two, who had met together as seat-mates 
on that cold Sunday morning’s ride, might have been profited 
by the talk even had we been two Presbyterian elders in con- 
ference in revival time. 


Going Where the Other Man Is 


' The secret of getting successfully interested in an- 
other is simply that we deliberately put ourselves 
mentally into that one’s place. It takes mental effort, 
and sacrifice of easy-going comfort to do this, but not 
exceptional genius. The old story of the lost horse 
is a familiar one. The whole village had turned out to 
find the horse, but had failed. Finally a youth who had 
the reputation of being somewhat feeble-minded led 
the horse home. Upon being plied with questions as to 
hew he had done what every one else had failed to 
do, he quietly explained. He had first ascertained 
where the horse had last been seen. “ Then I went 
there,” he said, “ and I just said to myself, ‘now where 
would I go if.I was a horse?’ And I went there, and 
there he was.” It was not only a simple method, but 
the only one. We have got to learn to go where the 
other fellow is if we want to find him. 

An incident in a well-known pastor’s experience 
illustrates this with telling effectiveness: 


“Yes, I want to come into the church; have been wanting 
to come for fifteen years,” a woman said to the minister when 
he urged her to confess Christ at the next communion. “ But 
I’m waiting for Jim. You know he’s a good man, yet he 
doesn’t have much use for the church, or—begging your pardon 
—for preachers. He tells me te go ahead, and stop waiting for 


1Pages 46-52. 


102 Taking Men Alive 


him. Many a time I’ve made up my mind to do just that. 
Then, at the last minute, I think if I wait just a little while 
longer, surely he’ll come with me. What would you do?” 

The visitor told her the best thing she could do would ke 
to become a church member without further delay, for she 
would have a better chance to influence her husband as a pro- 
fessed Christian than as an outsider. Before the call was con- 
cluded, she agreed that this was her best course. 

As the minister left, he said, “ Please remember me to Mr. 
B. when he comes home, tell him I am sorry to have missed 
him, and that I hope to have a good talk with him soon.” 

A few days later he met Mrs. B. once more. “ Jim made 
me promise to tell you something for him,” she said, much 
embarrassed. “He says if you want to see him so much you 
will just have to go where he is.” 

“ And where is that?” was the inquiry. 

“Hadn’t you better wait a few days before going to 
him? Then he’ll be where the likes of you can get to him 
better. You see, to-day he’s working on the last section of the 
steeple of the new church.” 

It was enough. The minister made up his mind he Rand 
find Jim that very afternoon. At the church—a magnificent 
building with a lofty spire—he learned that his quarry was 
indeed at the top. “ You can’t get to him—though; nothing 
but ladders to climb on; better let us call him down,” the 
foreman suggested. 

But the minister had been challenged to go where Jim 
was. So he climbed ladder after ladder until—nearly two 
hundred feet above the street—he found a much-surprised man. 
A few minutes were spent in very satisfactory conversation. 
Then the minister climbed down to make other calls. 

The next Sunday Jim became a member of the church his 
wife had already joined, and was thereafter known as an 
earnest Christian man. His friends wondered a little at the 
change in his life; but the only explanation he would give 
was this :— 

“The preacher who'll climb two. hundred feet of ladders 
to call on me can have me every time!” 1 


1The Rev. John T. Faris, in The Sunday School Times, 


ee 


ee ae ee ee Se 


EE 


; 





Seeking Common Interests 103 


A young man of pronounced agnosticism but of 
scholarly scientific interests one time came into Dr. 
Trumbull’s horizon. There was no common ground 
at all, in spiritual matters, to begin with. The older 
man, however, learned—by making it his business to 
learn—that the younger student was deeply interested 
in a certain line of scientific study. Promptly he set 
out to know something of that subject himself. He 
spent some weeks in reading it up. He gathered books 
on it, every one he could lay his hands on, and put 
them by. Then one day he mentioned to the young” 
student that he had several books in that field at his 
office, and he invited him to avail himself of thera 
whenever he cared to look them over. The subject 
became a theme of mutual interest, and the younger 
man eagerly seized opportunities of discussing it 
with one who knew so much more about it than 
most persons he met. From that common ground, 
reached only by the costly sacrifice of time and 
study by the soul-winner, it was not difficult to 
lead on to spiritual matters; and the day came when 
the once-agnostic thanked God and his confessed 
Saviour that one man had been willing to be “all 
things ”’ to him. 

This seeking of the “ other fellow’s” interests was 
a secret of the success of the founder of the Young 
Men’s Christian Association, Sir George Williams. 
His biographer tells a characteristic incident of his 
young manhood: 


bd 


George Williams was possessed also of that extraordinarily 
rare virtue in a young man—tact. He was wont to say, when 
asked as to the means he suggested for tackling a young man, 
“Don’t argue, take him to supper,” and in more than one in- 
stance he carried out his suggestion literally. In reviewing 


104 Taking Men Alive 


these early days, George Williams used to tell the story of how 
they won over to their side one of the young fellows in the 
house who was most active in his opposition, and whose con- 
duct was a terrible ordeal for their faith, He held a good 
position in the business, and, as George Williams relates, “we 
could not get near him in any way. When any young fellow 
gave his heart to Christ, he would pounce upon him and say, 
‘We'll soon take all that nonsense out of you!’” 

This young man was the organizer and chairman of the 
“free-and-easy” held on Saturday evening at the adjoining 
public-house, ‘‘The Goose and Gridiron,” and largely fre- 
quented by Hitchcock & Rogers’s assistants. Ina short time he 
had promoted a very active and vigorous campaign against 
these young men of the upper room, and naturally he was at 
once marked out by them for special and particular prayer. 
For many weeks they waited in vain for sign of change. His 
hostility increased in vehemence and bitterness. 

The best part of one evening’s meeting was devoted to a 
discussion as the most likely means of getting into touch with 
this most unsympathetic young man. 

“Can any one tell me,” said George Williams, “if there 
is anything he is especially fond of which we could give him? 
Can we do anything that will overcome his dislike for us?” 
One of those present suggested with a touch of humor that he 
had a passion for oysters. 

“Let’s give him an oyster supper, then,’ said George 
Williams. ‘ Who is the best man to invite him?” 

They selected one who was on comparatively friendly 
terms with the chairman of the “ free-and-easy,” and in due 
course he was casually informed that a number of the young 
fellows were going to join in a big oyster supper, and would 
be glad if he would accompany them. The idea of these 
Christian young men indulging in such frivolity amused him 
immensely, and in a spirit of bravado he accepted their invita- 
tion. 

It was a lively evening for all concerned, and all enjoyed 
it, for George Williams had given strict instructions that no 
attempt at proselytising was to be made on that occasion. 
Their avowed enemy, finding himself in such pleasant com- 
pany, came to the conclusion that these young men were not so 


Seeking Common Interests 105 


black as he had painted them. As a return for their hospi- 
tality, he consented later on to attend one of their meetings. 
The sequel is best told in an extract from the diary of George 
Williams’s friend, Edgar Valentine, who writes in May, 1844: 

“Tn the course of the day George Williams came to me 
and said he believed something particular was going to happen 
to-day, inasmuch as the Spirit’s operation seemed visible in 
our midst. A young man by the name of Rogers was seriously 
impressed about his soul’s salvation. G. W. spoke to him 
after we had arranged to have a prayer-meeting in the even- 
ing, and whilst engaged packing up a parcel Rogers came to 
me and told me that he was thinking very seriously about 
his immortal soul.” 

The next morning Rogers was still more concerned, and 
William Creese, noticing his attitude, said to George Williams, 
“George, what is up with Rogers?” “I do not know,” he 
replied, “but I feel I cannot pray for him any longer. I was 
praying for him this morning until it seemed as if I heard a 
voice from heaven saying to me ‘ Yes,’ and I knew he would be 
converted.” Shortly afterwards Rogers definitely threw in his 
lot with the little band of the upper room. His name is to be 
found among the first twelve members of the Association.* 


The question sometimes arises as to whether a soul- 
winner may properly interest himself in any and every 
interest of another man’s in order to influence and win 
him. The answer to that question is plain and unmis- 
takable. One may devote himself to any interest 
under the sun that is not actually wrong or harmful 
in its effects. It is never necessary to depart one 
jot or one tittle from Christ’s standards in order to 
win men’s confidence. But it is often necessary to 
depart a long way from our own natural interests in 
order to meet another on common ground. We must 
never let down; we must often go far afield. Here 


1From ‘The Life of Sir George Williams,” by J. E. Hodder 
Williams, pages 98-101. 


106 Taking Men Alive 


is the difference between playing a game of tennis with 
a man in order to reach him, and playing a game of 
cards; or between letting a man smoke or drink in 
your presence without a word of criticism, though 
courteously declining his invitation to join him, as over 
against the fatal mistake of supposing that you would 
gain in influence with him by indulging in what you 
know and he knows (or will know later) is against 
your principles. 

Another question that is sometimes asked, especially 
in the case of a busy minister, is whether one may not 
make the mistake of spending too much time over the 
temporal interests of a single individual in the hope of 
leading him eventually to Christ. Should a pastor, for 
example, spend a solid half-day, or day, or even more, 
in getting work for a man out of a job, in order to 
prove to that man his genuine interest in his bodily 
welfare, and with the purpose of winning the man to 
Christ, when that pastor might in the same time speak 
a word for Christ to perhaps a score of other souls? 
In other words, shall we choose the touch-and-go 
method, or the slower, costlier plan? 

Can there be any real doubt as to which method has 
Christ’s approval? The touch-and-go plan will have 
just about as much effectiveness as the lightness of its 
words imply. We are not in this work chiefly for 
arithmetical results. Christ did not work that way. 
Once let men get the impression that a pastor or a 
neighbor cares only for their souls and not at all for 
their bodies, and his influence over them is gone. As 
Wilfred T. Grenfell, the sturdy young English phy- 
sician who is giving his life to reclaiming the bodies 
and souls of the Labrador fisherfolk, has said: “Is not 


Seeking Common Interests 107 


the real problem of Christianity how best to commend 
it to the world? Can we afford to divorce the ‘ secu- 
lar’ from the ‘ religious,’ any more than the ‘ religious’ 
from the ‘secular’? It seems to me there is only one 
way to reach the soul—that is, through the body. For 
when the soul has cast off the body we cannot reach 
it at all.” 


12. 


13. 


Topics and Questions for Study and Discussion 


(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 


Give a definition of salvation that should appeal to a 
man who claims to be in doubt about the next world. 

What mistake of emphasis should we avoid in talking 
and thinking of spiritual matters? 

Give Bushnell’s definition of faith. 

How long may we need to study another man’s interests 
in winning him to Christ? 

Quote Paul’s statement as to the importance of seeking 
others’ interests in seeking to save them. 

What is necessary to the removing of a barrier which 
is preventing two men from finding common ground? 

When talking with one whose creed differs from our 
own, is it well to emphasize the differences of belief, 
or to emphasize points of agreement? Why? 

What common ground can always be found between 
Protestants and Catholics? 

What common ground should you say can always be 
found between Jews and Christians? 

What is there in our going where the other man is that 
is likely to attract him to us? 

What suggestive advice of six words was Sir George Wil- 
liams fond of giving to soul-winners? 

How far may we go in identifying ourselves with an- 
other’s interests? 

What did Grenfell say as to our duty of giving promi- 
nent attention to men’s bodies and secular interests? 













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THES PLACHY OL STH EABIBEE 
IN THIS WQRK 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 
(For study before reading this chapter) 


What is your own thought as to the use of 
Scripture quotations in individual soul-win- 
ning? 

Is there any danger of a tendency to use the 
Bible as a fetish? Give illustrations of such 
use. How should that danger be guarded 
against ? 

Wherein is the Bible like other books? 

Wherein is the Bible different from all other 
books? 

Under what circumstances should you say a 
Bible quotation would be most effective? 
Under what circumstances should you say a 
Bible quotation would be least effective? 
Now formulate a principle for the use of the 

Bible in individual soul-winning. 


VI 


THE PLACE OF THE BIBLE IN 
THIS WORK 


HE Bible is the soul-winner’s indispensable equip- 
ment. But it is not necessarily his tool. A mo- 
ment’s consideration of the principles already studied 
will show why. Ninety-nine persons in a hundred, of 
those who have not yet come to Christ, are not deeply 
interested in the Bible. A Bible text is not, as yet, 
attractive bait to them. The fact that the Bible ought 
to be attractive to them has nothing to do with the 
matter. We are working with men as they are, not 
with men as they ought to be. If they were already 
just where they ought to be in their interests, they 
would be in no need of our attention. 

Recognizing, therefore, that the Bible and its teach- 
ings have little place in the chief interests of the great 
number of those whom we would reach: if we would 
use bait that shall attract them at the outset, and seek 
interests that are common to them and ourselves, we 
must, as a rule, begin with something else than a Bible 
quotation. 

This principle was one of Christ’s principles in the 
work of individual soul-winning,’ and is in accordance 
with all that we know of human nature, and of God’s 


1See page 179, Chapter IX, of this volume. 
IIIf 


112 Taking Men Alive 


approved ways of dealing with men. It underlies 
successful man-winning in every sphere of life. Don’t 
expect the man whom you would win to begin with 
your interests; begin with his. 

Apply the test to some of the actual instances of 
successful soul-winning that we have already studied. 
Take the case of the whiskey-drinking seat-mate in 
the railroad train.1 What would have been the out- 
come if, after the flask had been proffered, the soul- 
winner had begun his conversation with the impressive 
words, “wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging.” 
Probably some such answer as, “ Then I guess I'll do 
my raging back in the smoker, stranger,’ and that 
day’s opportunity would have come to an abrupt end- 
ing with the man’s exit. 

Or suppose the young army chaplain, hitherto un- 
known to the profane old skipper in charge of the 
perilous transport expedition, had introduced himself 
that evening with any of these phrases: “ Swear not 
atrall.” “Let your speech=be Yea, yea; Naynayes 
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God 
in vain.” Just what likelihood is there that the skipper 
would have been so won to the stranger as to have 
offered him his cabin for that night? 

The point is not that those Scripture passages do 
not contain truth which those two men sorely needed 
to consider. But the men were in no state of mind to 
listen to Scripture passages at the outset. Later on, 
when that old skipper had “ come as a little child to be 
a disciple of Jesus,” he probably treasured some of 


1Chapter IV, pages 80-83, of this volume. 


2 Chapter IV, pages 83-88, of this volume. 


The Place of the Bible 113 


those very Scripture passages as safeguards of his 
life. But this was because he had been talked to first 
of all in his “ own language,” which was not the lan- 
guage of the Bible, and about his own interests, which 
were not yet Scriptural or spiritual. 


H. Clay Irumbull’s Habit 


Dr. Trumbull was a devoted Bible-student from 
the time of his conversion till the day of his death. 
So absorbing a piace did Bible-study fill in his life that 
he believed he might be permitted to continue his Bible 
studies in the next world. His regular daily plan of 
Bible reading was to read the Book through from 
Genesis to Revelation, short sections at a time, turning 
back to Genesis to begin again after he had finished. 
In this way he read and studied and re-read and re- 
studied every word of the Scriptures through a long 
lifetime. He drew his strength and knowledge, his 
convictions, his hopes, his guidance and his life, from 
the pages of that book. The writer has the little pocket 
Bible, in its tattered buckskin case, which the army 
chaplain kept close to him as more of a protection than 
his sword and his pistol during the dark days of the 
Civil War. 

Yet an examination of the experiences in individual 
soul-winning that are the basis of our present study 
shows that Dr. Trumbull rarely quoted Scripture when 
he was first seeking to win another to Christ. The 
reasons for this we have already seen. 

Although the writer had talked over with his 
father many of the incidents described in “ Individual 
Work,” he had never happened to ask him specifically 
his thought as to the place of Bible-quoting in this 


114 Taking Men Alive 


work. The conviction as to the principle suggested 
in this chapter was simply the result of inductive study 
of the facts. It was the more interesting and signifi- 
cant, therefore, when, three years after Dr. Trumbull’s 
death, there was discovered the following letter that 
the author of “ Individual Work” had written on this 
very question to a stranger at a distance who had 
asked his advice. The letter was written in the last 
year of Dr. Trumbull’s life. It is interesting, also, 
to note the emphasis upon the principle that “ one is 


more than many.” 
February 2, 1903. 
My DEAR BroTHER: 

Your kind letter interests me, and I thank you for your 
pleasant words. I am indeed glad that anything I have written 
has been of service to you or to those whom you know. 

As to the questions you ask, I fear I may startle you, if 
not indeed shock you by frank answers. I was never a theo- 
logical student nor a pastor. My training has been wholly 
practical, among men as they are. I have been an army chap- 
lain and a Sunday-school worker. Hence, my ways are un- 
conventional; and not like those you are taught in the books. 

(1) I have not been in the habit of using Bible texts or 
Bible language in my talks with individuals. I talk in the 
most natural and direct way with my fellows about their duty 
and their desires. If I used a Bible text, some conventional or 
erroneous meaning may have attached to it by the person to 
whom I am speaking. I seek help, and, in a sense inspiration, 
from the God of the Bible; but I want everything fresh from 
him for the case in hand. 

(2) In seeking to develop a local church along this line, 
I should give myself to one man of that church. One man is 
more to me than a thousand in this matter. When he is won 
it is time to think of another. If I thought of two men at 
the same time, I might fail to give myself wholly to the one I 
was living to win. 

(3) I think that most local churches consider souls as 
more important than a soul. In consequence, an aroused 


The Place of the Bible 115 


Christian is more desirous of seeing a great revival than of 
winning to Christ the one soul who ought to be revived. Yet — 
a good deal depends on whether the mission of a local church 
is to train souls in Christ’s service, or to win outside souls 
to Christ. In either case, work must be directed accordingly. 

As you asked me about these three points I tell you 
frankly my thought on the subject, without saying that you 
ought to, or are likely to, think the same way. 


Cordially and fraternally yours, 
H. Cray TRUMBULL. 


When the Bible is Common Meeting-Ground 


Of course, if we find, as we may in an exceptional 
case, one who is not Christ’s confessed follower yet 
who is greatly interested in the Bible, then the Bible 
may be the very meeting-ground of common interest 
that we can properly seek. Such an unusual case as 
this is notably illustrated in the following experience 
of the Rev. George F. Pentecost, D.D.: 


It was in the Chicago Tabernacle. The inquiry-rooms 
had been crowded all the evening. It was now about eleven 
o’clock, and most of the workers and inquirers had gone 
home. A few, however, of both classes were lingering still. 
I had just left a man—a straightforward German—who had 
given himself up to God through Jesus Christ; and was about 
leaving the room, not seeing that there was anything more 
for me to do, when I was approached by a young Christian, 
who said: 

“Mr. Pentecost, before you go, won’t you come and speak 
to that young man?” (pointing to him). “I do not seem to 
be able to meet his need.” 

“Certainly,” said I, and went over to where the young 
man was seated; and drawing a chair up to him, said: 

“Can I be of any help to you, my brother?” 

“TI don’t know, I am sure; but if you can give me any 
help, I will gratefully receive it.” 

A few questions developed the fact that he was a cul- 


116 Taking Men Alive 


tivated young German, the son of a German rationalistic theo- 
logian. He had been but a short time in America. He was 
thoroughly conversant with the current Continental sceptical 
philosophies. He told me that he was fond of study, and es- 
pecially philosophical study; and gave good evidence of fa- 
miliarity with the various schools of thought, current and 
past. He said he had been led to think of Christianity as an 
ingenious mythology (having a very slender thread of his- 
torical truth in it), more or less the product of an early en- 
thusiasm that had exalted Jesus into Deity. He confessed that 
he had never made the New Testament a study, but had im- 
bibed his opinions mainly from Strauss. He went on to say 
that he had been attracted by curiosity into the Tabernacle; 
and had been amazed at the vast audiences held together week 
after week, without excitement, simply by the proclamation 
of Christian truths, and the recital of Bible stories. He ad- 
mitted that he was impressed with the matter of Mr. Moody’s 
preaching, and was convinced from his manner that he was a 
sincere and honest teacher. 

Finally, he determined to take up the New Testament, 
and carefully read it. He had done so; and this night he had 
come into the inquiry-room to seek conversation with some 
Christian who would explain, if it were possible, some of the 
chief difficulties that he met with in the New Testament. He 
was altogether frank and candid, saying that he was free to 
admit that a careful reading of the New Testament revealed 
a purer and altogether better system of ethics than that of 
any of the philosophies with which he was acquainted; and 
that the whole book had an air of sincerity and truth about it. 
But there were several insuperable difficulties in the way 
of his acceptance of it as truth. 

I asked him to state his difficulties, which he did in about 
these words: 

“There are three chief claims set forth in the New Tes- 
tament, upon the truth of which, it seems to me, the whole 
system must stand or fall.” 

“What are they?” . 

“Why, first of all, it is claimed all through the New Tes- 
tament that Jesus was the Son of God; 7. e., God manifested 
in human nature—a supernatural Being. This he claimed for 


The Place of the Bible 117 


himself, and even died in defense of the claim; for, if I am 
not mistaken, that was the charge upon which he was put to 
death by the Jews; viz., that in claiming to be the Son of God 
he made himself to be equal with God—which was, under the 
Jewish law, blasphemy. Certainly he seems to have believed 
himself to be God; and so also did his apostles, especially 
John and Paul.” 

“Well, what is your next difficulty?” 

“Why, the next difficulty is that our salvation depends, 
not upon the uprightness of our own lives, but upon the 
fact of Christ’s death, which is represented as a sacrificial 
act—what Mr. Moody calls ‘the atonement.’ ” 

“Well, what is the other difficulty?” 

“The resurrection of Christ from the dead. Everything 
in Christianity depends upon that.” 

“Well,” said I, “now why are these things difficulties to 
your” 

“Why, I cannot possibly believe that Jesus was God. He 
could not be. And it is not possible for any one who was 
really dead to rise again. Such a thing never was in the world, 
and it could not be. And even if it were so, I do not see how 
any one could be saved on account of another’s death, and 
not on account of his own uprightness.” 

I confess that the task before me seemed very great in- 
deed. But he seemed guileless in his desire to know the 
truth; and so, with a prayer in my heart for help, I said: 

“Well now, let us look at the first difficulty—the incarna- 
tion. As I understand it, you are a Theist. You believe in 
the existence of a personal, eternal, and omnipotent God, who 
is the Author of the universe and of our being?” 

“Oh yests 

“Very well. Now, with that for a starting point, you 
cannot philosophically hold that the incarnation is an impos- 
sibility—that it could not be.” 

A very little talk ended in his admitting the possibility 
of the incarnation, but denying the probability of it. And then 
he went on to say, with the quickness of thought and the 
clearest perception of the whole matter: 

“But I think Jesus was himself deceived. I grant that 
he may have, in moments of enthusiasm, thought he was the 


118 Taking Men Alive 


Son of God; and that he did at times make this claim there 
is no doubt. But at other times he certainly made such state- 
ments as forbid us, on his own testimony, to believe that he 
was equal with God; indeed, he admits that he is an inferior 
being. In fact, Christ’s own testimony concerning himself is 
contradictory. 

“ And this leads me to question the truth of the Gospels; 
and so to reject Christ as the Son of God, and hence Chris- 
tianity itself. For Christianity is nothing but a beautiful de- 
lusion, if Christ is not what he claims to be. Now he says in 
one place, ‘I and my Father are one’ (John 10:30); and 
again, ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John 
14:9); and, as I have before said, when on trial before the 
high priest he still claimed, and that in the face of certain 
death, that he was the Son of God. (Mark 14:62; Matt. 
26:64.) But he said on another occasion that his Father 
was greater than he. (John 14:28.) Now he cannot be one 
with God, and at the same time inferior to God. And he 
says, ‘ All power is given unto me.’ (Matt. 28:18.) Now that 
is an admission that he had not power himself, but it was 
given to him; and surely he that receives power is inferior to 
him that gives it. Now are not these contradictions in his 
own testimony? And do not they destroy the worth of it 
entirely? It seems to me that, whatever of truth there may be 
in the historical existence of Jesus Christ, he only imagined 
that he was the Son of God; and that in speaking of himself, 
he spoke according to the mood he was in, sometimes believ- 
ing himself to be the Son of God.” 

After hearing him through, I turned to the passages he 
had referred to, and having read them aloud, I said: 

“Let us suppose that you had been on earth when Jesus 
was here, and had heard him make these contradictory (?) 
statements; and had asked him, saying, ‘Master, I do not 
quite understand you. A little while ago you said, “I and my 
Father are one,” and, “ He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father;” and again you say, “ My Father is greater than I,” 
and, “All power is given me.” How can you be one with 
the Father, and yet less than the Father? And how can you be 
equal with the Father, if your power is given to you, and not 
yours independently?’ And suppose he had said in reply, 


The Place of the Bible 11g 


‘My child, what if, for the purpose of your redemption from 
sin and the curse of the law, I voluntarily laid aside my eternal 
glory, and suffered myself to be born of a woman, and made 
under the law, thus limiting my being to the conditions of 
your nature, that I might, in that nature, offer up to God such 
a sacrifice for sin as would enable him to proclaim forgiveness 
of sins to the whole world? In such a case can you not con- 
ceive that there is no contradiction in these sayings of mine? 
For, indeed, J am one with the Father, and he that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father; but for purposes of atonement I 
have voluntarily assumed an inferior position, that I might 
thus take your place and die, which I could not have done 
unless I had taken a subordinate place, yea, and your very 
nature. Thus I sometimes speak of my eternal relation to 
God, and sometimes of my relation to him as the messenger 
of the covenant sent forth to redeem.’ ” 

He listened attentively to this; and then said, as if speak- 
ing to himself: 

“Yes, that might be; I can see how that might be. But” 
(speaking to me) “ did Christ ever make such an explanation ? 
Is that the theory of Christ’s subordination to the Father? ” 

In answer to this inquiry I turned to the second chapter 
of Philippians, and said: 

“Certainly this is the explanation of it; for see, Paul was 
trying to inculcate lessons of humility, by exhorting the 
Philippians to voluntarily take a subordinate place in relation 
to each other, though they might, as a matter of fact and 
right, stand on an equality; and enforced his exhortation by 
this reference, ‘Let this mind be in you, which was also in 
Christ Jesus; who, being in the form of God, thought it not 
robbery to be equal with God’ (thought not his equality with 
God something to be contended for) : ‘but made himself of no 
reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was 
made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion 
as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, 
even the death of the cross.’” (Phil. 2: 5-8.) 

He took my Bible in his hand, and read the passage over 
and over himself, and said: “ Wonderful! wonderful!” And 
still holding the book in his hand, with quivering chin and 
moistened eyes, he said: 


120. Taking Men Alive 


“Yes, the Son of God made himself of no reputation FoR 
ME; and took my nature, and died on the cross FOR ME!” 

And then, looking up into my face, he said: 

“What have I got to do about it?” 

To which I replied: 

“Accept him; believe on him; and confess him as your 
Saviour.” 

Mayr ltcy 

I replied, opening my Bible to Romans 10:9: “If thou 
shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and _ shalt 
believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the 
dead, thou shalt be saved.” 

“Let me see that!” 

I handed him the book, and he read it aloud, and then 
said: 

“TI do believe in my heart that God raised him from the 
dead; and I do acknowledge him as my Saviour.” 

We dropped down together upon our knees (with a little 
group which had gathered about us); and I offered a brief 
prayer of thanksgiving to God for his conversion, and a little 
petition for his keeping. 

Thus was the young Rationalist converted. 

It will be seen at a glance that no attempt was made to 
meet his objections by an exhaustive argument, but by simply 
presenting the biblical statement to him, leaving the work 
of conviction to the Holy Spirit. As a mere argument, the 
statement may have been very defective; but God can take 
his own truth and use it more mightily than the strongest 
argument man can construct. 


The exceptional features of this case are to be 
noted. The man who was won had come of his own 
accord, because of his interest in Christianity, to a 
place where he hoped to get light. He was interested 
in the Bible at second-hand, and needed only wise 
guidance to the truths of the Bible at first hand. He 
had specific difficulties of interpretation of Christian- 
ity; when those difficulties were met by one whose 
familiarity with the whole Bible enabled him to meet 


The Place of the Bible 121] 


them, the man’s course was clear. Without such Bible- 
knowledge, Dr. Pentecost would have been helpless. 
Here the Bible as the worker’s equipment became also 
the worker’s tool. 


The Principle Restated 


To re-state, then: we must know the Bible by per- 
sistent, exhaustive, life-long study. We can never 
make its precious, life-saving truths too thoroughly a 
part of our minds and hearts and being. It is the 
Guide Book to the Way of Life, not only for ourselves, 
but for those whom we would win. And our work 
with them is not complete until we have brought them 
to a recognition of the Bible which shall give it the 
same unique place in their lives that it has in ours. 

But this leading of men to the Bible is to be ac- 
complished, as a rule, by wisely recognizing that those 
whom we would win to Christ are probably not inter- 
ested in the Bible to begin with: that their attitude is 
more likely to be indifferent or even antagonistic to 
it at the start. This being so, we shall do better to 
make our approach in the language of their everyday 
life and in the terms of their present interests, leading 
them later, with loving skill, to the Book without 
which any life is sadly incomplete. 





Topics and Questions for Study and Discussion 
(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 


i. What is, and what is not, the relation of the Bible to the 
soul-winner? 

2. Why is a Bible-quotation seldom the best bait to begin 
with in seeking to win a soul to Christ? 


122 Taking Men Alive 


IO. 


TI. 


In accordance with what principle must we determine 
when to use Bible verses? 

What was Dr. Trumbull’s method of personal Bible- 
study? 

What was his practise as to quoting Scripture in indi. 
vidual work? 

What reasons did he give for not using Bible texts? 

When does the Bible furnish a good meeting-ground of 
common interest? 

What were the three difficulties of the young German 
unbeliever ? 

Describe just how they were met by Dr. Pentecost. 

State the exceptional features of the young German’s 
case. Show how they made his case different from 
most cases of every-day opportunity in individual soul- 
winning. 

Restate the principle that determines the place of the 
Bible in individual work. 


CONVICTION BETTER THAN 
DISCUSSION OR ARGUMENT 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 
(For study before reading this chapter) 


What is discussion? What is argument? What 
is conviction? 

Name some “ border-line” questions of conduct 
concerning which even Christian people dis- 
agree. 

Under what circumstances is it proper for one 
man to tell another man his duty? 

What objections can you think of to giving dis- 
cussion and argument a place in individual 
work? 

What is the best way to help a man to decide 
all border-line questions aright? 

What characteristic, among the men that you 
know, seems to give a man the greatest in- 
fluence with other men? How do you ac- 
count for this? 


VII 


CONVICTION BETTER THAN DISCUSSION 
OR ARGUMENT 


ESE is only One in the universe who can safely 
tell a man his duty as to the details of everyday 
life and practise. Therefore it is our chief duty to lead 
our fellows to that One, and to seek to win them to 
a loyal acceptance of him as their Head and Guide and 
Saviour, so that he may settle their questions of duty 
for them. It is never our duty to attempt to settle 
for our fellows such questions as God intends they 
shall refer to him. About the only duty that one man 
can safely and unconditionally prescribe for another 
man is the supreme duty of surrender to God’s will. 
Unwillingness or failure to recognize this simple 
truth has caused many an earnest worker to become a 
stumblingblock rather than a guide-post to those whom 
he honestly longs to help. Many a promising spiritual 
conversation has gone to pieces on the rock of discus- 
sion of details of personal duty. Let us avoid this 
error as a snare and a pitfall. The Devil will have 
little to fear from our efforts at individual work if we 
let them become debates over border-line problems in 
everyday life. 

An actual incident will make the practical appli- 
cation of this truth plainer. A man of the world 
whom Dr. Trumbull had, after careful study, brought 

125 


126 Taking Men Alive 


to the point of hearty interest in the claims of Christ, 
had asked for help in ascertaining the way of salva- 
tion.? 


My companion was different from any one with whom I 
had ever conversed personally on the theme of themes. He 
had not been, while a child, under the religious training and 
influences with which I was most familiar. Hence there 
seemed to be no such common basis for a preliminary under- 
standing as I had been accustomed to find. Yet this neces- 
sitated a coming down to first principles, which, after all, had 
its decided advantages in such a conference as this. 

“My friend, would you like to be saved?” I asked at the 
start. 

“Indeed I would,” he replied. 

“Do you think that you can save yourself?” 

“T certainly do not,” was his response. 

“Do you know of any Saviour to be trusted except one?” 

“T do not,” he said heartily. 

“Well, now,” I said, “there is no necessity of your read- 
ing any books on the subject, to learn the way of salvation. 
[He had asked what books he might read in order to learn 
more of the subject.] Let me see, here and now, if you are 
willing to be saved by the one Saviour in his own way. Under- 
stand that I do not make any conditions or requirements of 
conduct or practise, in order for you to be saved; but I will 
ask you this question, in order to ascertain your attitude 
toward the whole subject. Suppose that you were to find 
that Jesus Christ wanted you to refrain from drinking, from 
smoking, from card-playing, from theater-going, and from 
much that accompanies these things, would you give them all 
up, or would you feel that there were some of these things 
that you could not refrain from?” 

My friend thought the matter over with evident serious- 
ness, and then he gave this intelligent answer: 

“Well, Mr. Trumbull, there are some of those things that 


1 The preliminary part of this case was considered in Chapter V, 
pages 96-98, of this volume. 


ae a 


Conviction Better Than Discussion 127 


I might have different views from yourself about; but if I 
were convinced that Jesus Christ wanted me to refrain from 
any one of those things, or from them all, I should be willing 
to conform my conduct to his wish.” 

“That’s all that I want to know,” I said. “I lay down no 
requirements. I want him who is to be your Saviour to be 
your guide. Now just go to your room and kneel down before 
the Lord, and tell him how it is. Tell him that you need a 
Saviour, that you do not know any Saviour other than himself, 
and that you want him to save you. Tell him that you are 
willing to put yourself into his hands, that you will conform 
your conduct and course to his wishes, and that you want to 
trust him.” 1 


To ask a man to let Christ settle his problems of 
duty for him is better than to try to settle them for 
him ourselves. The latter never does any good, and 
often does great harm. The outcome of the sensible 
and only safe procedure in this instance was signifi- 
cant. The man became 


an earnest, devoted follower of Christ, as I was familiar 
with him for precious years and in different spheres. He be- 
came a close student of the Bible. He and his wife together 
made an open confession of their new faith, and connected 
themselves with a prominent church in New York City. They 
became active in mission-school work, and in that field he 
devoted his trained business mind to perfecting methods and 
systems of work, so that he was known widely throughout 
the country as a leader and guide in that field. He became, 
after a while, prominent as one of the most influential workers, 
and director of other workers, in the entire country. 

In his personal habits and conduct he became strict and 
careful, in the line of our talk that evening.’ 


Notice what Horace Bushnell, the famous moulder 
of theological thought of the middle of the last century, 


1 Pages 61-64. 2Pages 65-66. 


128 Taking Men Alive 


had to say of the principle of refraining resolutely 
from discussing or dictating another man’s personal 
duty: 

When JI, later, told Dr. Bushnell, to whom I had intro- 
duced the young gentleman, of that conversation, and of the 
outcome of it, the good Doctor said, characteristically : 

“That shows how much easier it is to do a big thing than 
a little thing. If you had begun to discuss with this man, at 
that time, any single habit or practise, you might never have 
got beyond it. “You would have been stranded on the first 
barrier. But to ask him to trust the whole thing to his 
Saviour, and be guided by him, was the better way. If one is 
right at the center, he is likely to get right at the circum- 
ference.” ? 


As with discussion over details of duty, so with 
argument over points of belief. Neither discussion nor 
argument is likely to draw men closer together; both 
tend rather to keep men apart. As such, both are to 
be resolutely avoided in a work which seeks above all 
else to win others to us, not to keep them at a distance. 

But there is a power that we may and must have 


in this work, and which utterly outdistances any seem- 


ing but empty skill in discussion or power in argument. 
It is the power of conviction. That power is well-nigh 
irresistible. It will win if anything can. It will swing 
a man over from false belief to true unless he is 
bound to the false forever. 


A man’s belief of what he proclaims goes far to make it 
believed by others. So long as he himself has any doubt on 
the subject, he is not likely to convince those who are in 
doubt. This is true in every sphere of life. If a man sees his 
neighbor’s house on fire, in the dead of night, his wild, ring- 
ing shriek of “Fire! Fire! Fire! Turn out! Turn out! Your 


2 Pages 66-67. 


ee 


Conviction Better Than Discussion 129 


house is afire!” sounds out on the midnight air with a force 


that is itself convincing. All who hear it know that the one 
who utters it feels its truth, and wants others to feel it. 

How different it would be if a man should knock timidly 
at the house door, and say gently that he had reason to think 
that a fire was kindling in the vicinity, and that he thought it 
would be well to look into the matter! How could he expect 
dull sleepers to be aroused on such a call? If his knowledge 
did not stir him more than this, how could he expect those yet 
asleep to be aroused from their torpor by him? 

Peculiarly is this the case with one who sounds a call to 
stir a sluggish soul to action, in view of truth that he deems 
precious and all-important, but which the other is not very 
anxious about or fully convinced of. Any show of doubt, or 
indicision, on the part of God’s herald, is calculated to shake 
the confidence of the hearer of the message. This has been 
found to be the case by every gospel preacher, or winner of 
single souls, in any sphere. Every show of earnestness, or 
evidence of intense conviction, on the part of those who stand 
for Christ, gives added weight to each word of the message 
from the Captain of our Salvation. Hearty Governor An- 
drew, of Massachusetts, said of Abraham Lincoln, when he 
had assumed the presidency, “I’m glad we’ve got a man who 
believes something.” If a man would have another believe 
_ something, he must believe something himself.1 

Intense conviction, showing itself in intense personality, 
marks the difference between an ordinary leader, or counselor, 
and an exceptional one. It was not the number of his soldiers, 
but his power to use every man as if he were ten men, or a 
hundred, that made Napoleon, or Phil Sheridan, the general 
that he was. Surely he who has Christ back of him in his 
every word and his every deed, ought to feel that he is wield- 
ing the power of the Almighty when he acts or speaks for his 
Saviour in that Saviour’s work.? 


Let our conviction, then, of the truth and joy of 
our message, shut out argument or discussion forever 
from our methods in the art of taking men alive. And 


1Pages 177-179. 2Page 186. 


130 Taking Men Alive 


our conviction may be twofold: the conviction that we 
know our message is true, and the conviction that the 
other man knows it is true. This latter, building on 
the image of God that is in every man, is one of the 
most disarming attacks we can make against the oppo- 
sition of unbelief. 


Resolute Refusal to Argue 


As illustrating the positive effectiveness of con- 
viction, along with a firm refusal to be drawn into a 
discussion, note the following: 


An earnest young clergyman in New England, whom I 
know well, began his ministry in a parish where his prede- 
cessor had lacked strong conviction, and had encouraged, if 
not cultivated, doubts. The new clergyman’s beliefs were 
startling to his congregation. One Sunday, after the service, 
a bright young man came up to the minister, and said: 

“T don’t believe what you are preaching, and I want to 
discuss your beliefs with you.” 

“Well, my friend, there’s no use in our doing that. I am 
convinced, and you don’t want to be. I am set here to preach 
the truth that I believe, whether my hearers believe it or not.” 

Weeks went on. The minister saw his young friend, Sun- 
day after Sunday, in the gallery. One Sunday the minister 
invited all who wanted to converse with him on the matter of 
personal religion to come to his study on Monday evening. 
That evening this young man appeared. Coming up to the 
pastor’s study table, where the pastor sat, he said: 

“JT am here to-night, not for argument, but for counsel. 
I’ve watched you and have heard you for weeks. I know that 
you have got something that I haven’t. Now I want you to 
tell me how I can get your crucified Christ.” 

The preacher was ready to help that seeker. And another 
soul was won to Christ through the counsel of a believer who 
had convictions.2 J 


21 Pages 179-180. 


Conviction Better Than Discussion 131 


Another worker, whose strength lay not in skilful 
words but in his simple conviction as to Christ’s love 
and what that love had done for him, had occasion 
to put this matter to the test. 


He was accustomed to ride out from Boston daily to and 
from a suburban town. One who was frequently his seat-mate 
was a man prominent as an unbeliever, and who edited a free- 
thinking periodical. Again and again this man endeavored to 
draw my friend into discussion on the subject of religion, but 
without succeeding in so doing. One day my friend openly 
met the matter in this way: 

“T do not want to have a discussion with you on the sub- 
ject of religion. I’m no match for you in argument. You’d 
get the better of me every time. But, apart from that, one 
thing I know, that the Lord Jesus Christ is my Saviour, and I 
trust him all the time. This is the comfort of my life, and I 
wish you had the same comfort.” 

At this his pertinacious seat-mate brought his hand down 
sharply on his friend’s knee and said heartily: 

“There you’ve got me, my friend. I’ve nothing to offer 
against that.” 

My friend’s conviction was his best and his resistless 
argument. “I know whom I have believed” will convince 
another if anything will. No method of discussion will take 
its place with any hearer.* 


And still another instance shows that while a 
pugnacious unbeliever may be surprised, even startled, 
by the blunt, insistent putting of an honest disciple’s 
conviction, he is more likely to be won by quiet 
tenacity here than by intricate argument. 


I was in an office where I occasionally had business, and, 
as I was talking with the proprietor, I said, as he asked my 
opinion in a matter of principle: 

“The Bible says so and so.” 


1Pages 181-182, 


132 Taking Men Alive 


“What Bible?” he inquired sharply, almost defiantly. 

“The Bible,” I replied to this question, quietly but firmly, 

“ Muhammadans have one Bible. Booddhists have another 
Bible. Jews have another Bible. Chinese have another Bible. 
Which Bible do you mean?” he responded. 

“The Bible,” was my response. 

“ Well, I suppose I know what you mean.” 

That was a point gained to start with. He admitted that 
“The Bible” was not to be put oa a plane with the others, so 
that he was really in no doubt on the subject. 

“ But,” he added, “I don’t agree with you as to the value 
of the Bible.” 

“T’m sorry,” I replied. 

“You think, I suppose,’ he went on to say, “that the 
Bible is God’s word.” 

“Of course I do.” 

“Well, won't you try to prove to me that it is so?” 

“No, indeed.” 

“Wouldn’t you like to have me believe the Bible?” 

“ Of course I should.” 

“Well, then, why not try to convince me?” 


Just here came the answer that startled this polemic 
would-be disputant out of the ruts of his ordinary and 
self-satisfied lines of thought. He had asked the 
“why” of the other’s refusal to attempt “logical 
proof,” and he got it: 

“Tf God has failed in this, with all that he has done for 
you in a third of a century, I dowt propose to set my little 
hazel-nut brain at the task at this late day.” 

“Why, then, won’t you prove to me that God is what you 
believe him to be?”’” 

To this question there came another answer that 
must have sunk in deep, not for its arguing power, 
but by the sheer weight of the immovable conviction 
that lay back of it: 


1Pages 182-183. 2Page 183. 


Conviction Better Than Discussion 133 


“The subject is too sacred for ordinary discussion. I 
wouldn’t consent to discuss with you the question whether my 
mother was really my mother; yet God is dearer to me than is 
my mother or my father.” 

At this I left the office without further comment.’ 


That even the unbelieving disputant was ready to 
recognize the believer’s position as a fair one appeared 
from what followed. 


A few weeks later I was there again. He said: 

“T understand, Mr. Trumbull, how you feel about the 
Bible; so I won’t ask you to discuss it. But have you any 
objection to telling me what you understand the Bible to teach 
on certain points?” 

“Not in the slightest,” I replied. 

Then the way was open for a frank, free, and reverent 
conference over the teachings of the Bible; and the man who 
had been a scoffer was ready to be told the truth as to Bible 
_teachings by one who had no doubts on the subject, and who 
therefore commanded confidence. Several such conferences as 
this seemed to bring this man into a different attitude toward 
the Bible and its teachings. After a longer absence than usual 
from Boston, when I was once more in the office of this man, 
he said to me: ; 

“Mr. Trumbull, will you tell me just where is your 
home?” 

As I told him, he said: 

“T’ve been very sick. I thought I was going to die, and 
I wanted to send for you.” 

Then, as if to show that he had not wholly abandoned his 
disbelief, he added: 

“Not that I was really troubled about myself or my be- 
liefs, but you seem so confident in your beliefs, that, if I was 
going to die, I wanted you to talk with me.” 2 


He was yielding hard; but he was yielding. And 
it would seem probable that he never would have made 


1 Page 184. 2 Pages 184-185. 


134 Taking Men Alive 


even the reluctant admission that he did to one who 
had met him on his own lower ground of debate con- 
cerning precious truths that are above and beyond 
debate. The opportunity was wider open now than ever 
before 

for a free talk about Christ and his salvation, which I tried 
to improve for that needy soul. “ For their rock is not as our 
Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges.” We surely 
ought to be confident in our beliefs, and impress others by 
this confidence, as we seek to win them to their Saviour and 


ours. We have every advantage, and we should show this in 
our loving labor for souls.* 


Even in that most difficult of all efforts, the win- 
ning back to Christ of one who has abandoned his dis- 
cipleship, it is conviction that has the power which 
argument would utterly lack. The chaplain had cause 
to remember this from a war-time encounter. 

When first I joined my regiment in North Carolina, I 
found there a young lieutenant, whom I had known as an ac- 
tive, earnest Christian worker in his Connecticut home. As 
I was looking up the members of my new charge, I called on 
him in his tent, and said something of my hope to have his 
help in work for my Master. 

“No, no, Chaplain,” said he, “I’ve given up all that 
stuff. I know now that there’s no truth in it, and I don’t 
want to hear a word on the subject.” ” 

How tempted most of us would have been to 
“argue that point’? with the young backslider! How 
much better than argument was this statement of the 
chaplain’s earnest conviction, coming with somewhat 
of the startling unexpectedness of a blow between the 
eyes: 


1 Pages 185-186. 2Page 77. 


Conviction Better Than Discussion 135 


ad 


ig 
“Vou are not saying now what you believe, Lieutenant.” 


The braggadocio was all gone as the young fel- 
low asked, in genuine surprise, of a man who had 
dared to meet his statement of intended conviction 
with a counter statement whose conviction seemed to 
ring even truer: 


“What do you mean, Chaplain?” 
And the earnest, kindly answer came back: 


“JT mean that I know you well enough to understand 
that what you said and did, for years, in your faithful Chris- 
tian work and in your Sunday-school teaching, has not been 
given up by you out of your inmost heart. You can talk this 
way to me now, to try to stiffen up your courage of resistance; 
but when the camp is quiet, and you are alone on your bunk 
in the darkness, you would never talk in this way to your God, 
who you know is near you always.” 

“Well,” he said, somewhat more gently, “I don’t want 
to talk about this subject, at any rate.” 

“But I must talk about it,” I said. “It’s very real to me. 
And I’m here because of my belief. I love you too dearly to 
refrain from speaking to you, and urging you to come back 
to your old love and faith and duty and joy.” 

Weeks passed on. When I saw the Lieutenant in his tent 
I would show him that I, at least, hadn’t lost my faith; yet I 
refrained from provoking any discussion on the subject. He 
seemed to be grateful for my interest in him, and he never 
again gave an expression of his unbelief, nor did he say that 
which would jar on me. I tried to reach him by indirect 
means, in talking about former interests and persons connected 
with our work together for our common Master. In this 
way, at times, the truth we had both then held dear would 
come into prominence; but no word of unpleasant difference 
was a result. 1 


It is discussion and argument that bring on un- 


1 Pages 77-79. 


136 Taking Men Alive 


pleasant differences, never straightforward, honest 
conviction. What was the end of this effort in which 
the believer would admit of no doubt? 


After a little there came on a battle in which our regi- 
ment lost severely. Several temporary hospitals were opened 
in small dwelling-houses in different parts of the field of 
action. As I was occupied in one cf these hospitals, I heard 
that my lieutenant friend lay wounded in another. As soon 
as I had opportunity, I went over to see him. His right leg 
had been amputated near the hip. He lay on a cot among 
many wounded. Looking up as I approached he said cheerily: 

“The Lord has got me, Chaplain. I wouldn’t serve him 
with two legs, so he took away one. But now I'll be more of 
a man with one leg than I was with two.” 

Then as I spoke warmly of my sympathy with and inter- 
est in him, he told of his experience and feelings. 

“As my leg went out from under me, and I felt I was 
gone, I said, ‘The Lord’s got me, and I’m glad of it.’ You 
were right, Chaplain, that day you came to my tent first, 
I never really gave up my belief, or had any rest in my 
life trying to live without faith. And now I believe I shall live 
nearer the Lord than ever, and have more comfort in him.” ? 


It was like that old-time wrestling match at the 
ford of the Jabbok, when the Lord touched the thigh 
of a man who had been persistently fighting him, and 
the rebel was crippled, and the crippling brought a 
changed life and a new name. Crippled into new life! 

The convictions of the chaplain-friend were bear- 
ing fruit: 

He was confident that he should soon be restored to health, 
and that he should use his new strength in the Lord’s service. 
I had pleasant interviews with him as he talked of his plans 


in Christ’s service, and he gave convincing evidence of his 
Christian love and faith. But the shock of the amputation was 


1 Pages 79-80. 


Conviction Better Than Discussion 137 


severer than he at first supposed, and he soon sank away to his 
final rest. The prodigal had returned to his loving Father’s 


home. } 

Topics and Questions for Study and Discussion 
(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 

1. What duties can one man safely and unconditionally pre- 
scribe for another? 

2. What error should we earnestly guard against in doing 
individual work? 

3. What is the best way to help a man to settle his prob- 
lems of personal life and conduct? 

4. What did Bushnell say about center and circumference? 

5. What effect are discussion and argument likely to have 
upon men’s relationship to each other? 

6. Give your own explanation of why intensity of conviction 
is such a power in working with men. 

7. What two convictions may we have in this work? 

8. What is the Christian’s best answer to skilled and in- 
tricate argument against his belief? 

9. When, should you say, is it well to give such blunt an- 
swers to men as that of the minister, on page 130 (“I 
am convinced, and you don’t want to be’); or that of 
Dr. Trumbull, on page 132 (“If God has failed in this,” 
etc.) ? 

10. Why has our conviction of belief special effectiveness in 


working with backsliders? 


1 Pages 80-81. 





ENCOURAGEMENTS AND INCENTIVES 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 


(For study before reading this chapter) 


Name the encouragements that you have had 
from your personal experience in individual 
soul-winning. 

Name all the encouragements that you can think 
of from the experiences and principles so far 
studied in this volume. 

What should you say is the greatest incentive 
we have to the doing of this work? 

What instances of rebuff by those approached 
on the subject of personal religion have you 
known in your own or others’ experiences? 

What prospect of success should you say there 
is in approaching one who knows _ before- 
hand that we intend to seek to win him? 

Is it a duty, or not, to work with those who are 
mentally deficient? Describe any instances 
you have known. 

Under what circumstances should we expect and 
urge an immediate decision for Christ? 

When is our full duty to an individual dis- 
charged by a single conversation with that 
one? 


VIll 
ENCOURAGEMENTS AND INCENTIVES 


J F it is true that there is an abundance of special and 
peculiar difficulties in the work of individual soul- 
winning, equally true is it that there is a richness of un- 
expected encouragement and uplift in the work. Every 
one who has obeyed the Master’s call to make disci- 
ples of others can testify to this with a glad heart. 
Indeed, the encouragement is so constant, and the re- 
wards are se rich, that the wonder is that the Devil 
succeeds as well as he does in keeping us faint-hearted! 
One of the most frequent experiences that lifts one 
up is the unexpected disclosure that God has been 
preparing the way for us: that those whom we thought 
indifferent or reluctant are eagerly awaiting a word. 
This was illustrated by a boarding-house experience 
of Dr, Trumbull’s: 


For a long time I and my family lived at a boarding- 
house in a New England city. There was, during that period, 
a season of special religious interest, or a general revival, in 
that city. There sat at the same table with us a gentleman 
and his wife, who, as we knew, were not confessing Chris- 
tians, or church-members, and had never expressed to us 
any particular interest in the revival movement in the city. 
One noonday I suggested to my wife that we ought to 
speak to our table neighbors personally on the subject, and 
urge them to surrender themselves to Christ. As she agreed 
with me as to our duty, I proposed that while I would go up 
to the gentleman’s place of business and have a loving talk 


141 


142 Taking Men Alive 


with him, she should seek out the wife in her room, and 
plead with her for Christ. This was agreed to. Then we 
knelt together and asked God’s blessing on our efforts, and 
on those in whose spiritual welfare we were interested. 

The gentleman was a bank officer. I called there just after 
bank hours, knowing that he would then be disengaged. As I 
asked him for an interview, he invited me into the directors’ 
room, and closed the door. When I spoke of my loving inter- 
est in him, and of my purpose in calling, he burst into tears, 
and said that he was so glad I had come. Then he told me 
how he had longed, day after day, for some one to speak to 
him on this subject. When men came in who were prominent 
and active in the prayer-meetings, he had tried, in vain, to 
lead the conversation to the point of a personal word, but 
had always failed. How adroit some Christians are in avoid- 
ing the subject of personal religion in business places and in 
business hours! I found this man longing to be helped into 
the kingdom, and glad to learn the way. That was an ever- 
to-be remembered conversation for Christ. 

When I went back to the house, at the close of the after- 
noon, my wife told me, with a cheerful face, of her experi- 
ence. After my leaving her, as she was preparing to go to 
the room of the wife she had on her heart, there was a knock 
at her door. As she opened the door that wife came in, and, 
bursting into tears, she asked if her friend wouldn’t help 
her to Christ. She had longed to be spoken to by some one, 
and now she could bear this no longer. The two wives went 
on their knees together, and they rose with glad and grate- 
ful hearts. 

That husband and wife soon stood up and confessed 
their faith together, as they connected themselves with the 
church. They were active for Christ in all the years until 
Shey entered into rest. And their children were prominent 
and useful in Christ’s service after them.1 


Two surprises in one day! Two needy souls, eager 
and longing for Christ if only some one in Christ 
would show the way! Was not the encouragement of 


1 Pages 53-56. 


Encouragements and Incentives 143 


that twofold welcome enough to carry one over some 
of the hard places in the work? 

Even when we are sure that there is little hope of 
winning a certain person because of that one’s known 
attitude of opposition, we are likely to be encourag- 
ingly disappointed if only we will make the trial. 
Take the difficult case of one who knew beforehand 
that certain people would endeavor to win him to 
Christ, and who had no sympathy with the idea. 


At one time I passed a Sunday in the home of a superin- 
tendent of a village Sunday-school in Connecticut. It was a 
humble home, back in the country, and no member of the 
family seemed to have had any special educational advan- 
tages. Yet not only the spiritual atmosphere of that home, 
but its religious exercises and methods, were such as to com- 
mand my respect, and to make me wish to commend them to 
others. This led me to ask how all this came about, and, 
in consequence, I learned this instructive story. 

The church of which this man was a member was an 
ordinary Connecticut church, not given to new things, but 
keeping on, year after year, in its tried and approved course. 
But in some way it had been led to try the experiment of 
having every family in the congregation, or parish, visited 
by appropriate members of the church for religious conversa- 
tion. Possibly it was in connection with the labors of an 
evangelist, but of that I am not sure. My host, who was 
now the superintendent, was then not a member of the church, 
nor was any one of his family. He had heard of this pro- 
posed movement, and as he sat in his home one day he saw 
one of the deacons and another church-member drive up to 
the house and get out for a call. So far from having any 
special interest in this, he spoke jokingly of it. 

But when the deacon was in the home of that man and 
his wife, speaking with them for Christ as he had never 
spoken before, they felt the power of his words, and when 
he knelt with them in prayer they were ready to commit them- 
selves to the Saviour in a sense of need and trust. Their 
Christian life was started at that time by that individual 


144 Taking Men Alive 


word to them, as all the sermons and pulpit appeals for years 
before had not influenced or been felt by them. From that 
hour that was a Christian household, every child feeling its 
influence for good. And soon that new comer into the king- 
dom at middle life was chosen superintendent of the Sunday- 
school because he was a better man for it than any man who 
had been trained from childhood in the church.} 


Suppose the soul-winning deacon had passed by 
that family because of the “hopelessness” of trying 
there! He never would have gained the encourage- 
ment that must have been his all through the years as 
he watched the results to that household and to the 
church and to the whole community from that single 
appeal for Christ. 


Rebuffs Almost Unknown 


It is a noteworthy fact that it is a rare, almost an 
unknown, experience for one to meet a rebuff when 
courteously and earnestly expressing an interest in 
another’s eternal welfare. Yet this is not strange. 
Everyone recognizes that the man who seeks to win 
another to Christ has no “axe to grind,” no ulterior 
motive. There is encouragement here for us all, timid 
and reluctant as we are. Of his traveling experiences 
Dr. Trumbull wrote: 


I have had hundreds of such conversations with seat- 
mates on the car, seat-mates whom I had never seen before, 
and whom I never met again. I never had such a conversa- 
tion which I had reason to regret, or which seemed to be 
distasteful to my companion. And many such a conversa- 
tion has brought out the warmest side of a fellow-Christian: 


Similar testimony could be had from every indix 


1 Pages 147-150. 2 Page 36. 


Encouragements and Incentives 145 


vidual worker. The biographer of Sir George Wil- 
liams, founder of the Young Men’s Christian Associa- 
tion, writes of him: 


When he crossed the Atlantic he made a point of speak- 
ing to every soul on board from the captain to the stoker, 
from the poker-players in the smoking-room to the emi- 
grants in the steerage. And the remarkable thing is that, 
although he must have spoken thus of their souls’ salvation 
to tens of thousands, he could never recall a single instance 
when he received a rude or mocking retort, a splendid 
tribute to the way in which the world is quick to recognize 
and appreciate, and pay homage to, true Christian sincerity 
when accompanied, as it was in the case of George Williams, 
with the rarest tact and most modest courtesy.* 


What of the Mentally Deficient P 


Is there any gain in working with those who are 
mentally sub-standard, slow of intellect, or actually 
half-witted? Are we not doomed to discouragement 
if we attempt it? Can they appreciate what it is to do 
right, or to come to Christ? Will not the Lord care 
for them anyway? Two army experiences gave Dr. 
Trumbull a conviction as to this field of effort that 
he never relinquished. 


There were strange characters, as well as strange experi- 
ences, encountered in my army Christian work. The army 
brought all sorts of persons together, and I had to become 
acquainted with and interested in them all. While at St. 
Augustine, Florida, in the winter of 1863-64, a part of our 
regiment did garrison duty at the old Spanish coquina fort, 
with its bloody memories and its weird legends of former 
occupants. I was accustomed to hold Sunday-school ser- 
vices each Sunday afternoon, and also mid-week evening 


1“The Life of Sir George Williams,” by J. E. Hodder Williams, 
page 249. 


146 Taking Men Alive 


services, in the little chapel opposite the main entrance of the 
fort. Just outside of that chapel there was a pile of rusty 
cannon, on which men would sometimes loll while we were 
having services inside. And as I moved about the fort I 
had many a talk with men whom I rarely met so familiarly 
elsewhere. 

One day, in walking through the fort, my attention was 
drawn to a strange face glaring through an iron-barred 
opening of a dungeon door in the southwestern corner of the 
casemated walls. It was the most repulsive face I had ever 
seen. Low-browed, coarse-featured, dark-complexioned, with 
small black eyes under shaggy eyebrows, and thick sen- 
suous lips, it seemed like a cross between a Digger Indian and 
a New Zealand native, with the worst peculiarities of both. 
The expression was one of low cunning, with a mixture of 
hate and derision. It was an unhuman face, yet the man who 
bore it was evidently one of my parishioners, or he would 
not be where he was. 

“Who are you, my friend?” I said. “Where do you 
belong?” 

He answered in a low, gruff voice, as if he were resent- 
ing an attack. | 

“T belong to the Tenth Connecticut.” 

“You belong to the Tenth Connecticut!” I said. ‘“ Why, 
then I’m your chaplain, and I’ve got an interest in you.” 

As I kindly questioned the man, I found that he had been 
most of the time since his enlistment in confinement for 
insubordination, and therefore I had not met him. After a 
brief talk I left him. Soon he was released from confine- 
ment, and was again with his comrades. I saw him occa- 
sionally, and spoke to him kindly, but I did not look upon him 
as a hopeful case in comparison with others, and had com- 
paratively little to say to him. 


Even the chaplain was not beyond feeling the tenip< 
tation of discouragement in such a case as this. There 
was a surprise in store for him. 


1 Pages 93-95. 


a 


a 


Encouragements and Incentives 14% 


After a while, we left Florida for Virginia. As we 
moved up along the coast ‘n a crowded transport, this man 
came to me in the throng, and said softly: 

“ Misser Chaplin, I want to talk to you.” 

“Well, I’m always glad to talk to you,” I said. “ But 
where can we go to talk? Let us lean over the steamer’s 
rail. That is our only place to talk by ourselves.” 

As we leaned there together, he told me his strange, 
pathetic story. 

“Misser Chaplin, you ’member when you talked to me at 
the dungeon door. You spoke kind to me. You said you’s 
my chaplin. I never forget that, Misser Chaplin. I’m a 
rough feller; I never knowed much. I suppose I’m human, 
that’s about all. I never had no bringin’ up. Fust I knowed 
o’ myself I was in the streets o’ New Orleans. Never knowed 
a father or mother. I was kicked about. I came North and 
‘listed in army. I’ve had a hard time of it. My cap’n hates 
the very groun’ I tread on.” 

Then with a chuckle and a leer, as he thought of his 
Ishmaelitish life, he said: “I did worry my cap’n. And he 
hated me. Ten months with ball and chain! A hard time of 
it! But what you said at the dungeon door’s all true. And 
what you said in prayer-meetin’ is all true.” 

“ Prayer-meeting!” I said. “I never saw you in prayer- 
meeting.” 

“No, I was jus’ outside, on those old cannon. And 
now, Misser Chaplin, I want to do right. Misser Chaplin, I 
suppose we’s goin’ into a fight, and I want to do my duty. 
They say I’m a coward. [ve never been in a fight, but I 
want to do my duty.” As a friend of mine, to whom I told 
this story, said, “The only religious instruction this man 
ever got was through eaves-dropping at a prayer-meeting.” 

Then in a voice strangely tender in contrast with the 
first gruff utterance which I heard from him in the dungeon, 
he said: “Misser Chaplin, you’re the only man who ever 
spoke kind to me. If I get killed I want you to have my 
money. And if I get killed, won’t you have it writ in the 
paper that Lino died for his country?” 

We reached Virginia. We were in a fight. Lino bore 
himself so bravely that his captain, whom he had worried so 


148 Taking Men Alive 


long, called him out before the entire company, at the close 
of the engagement, and commended him for his bravery and 
good service. Hearing of this, I looked him up after the 
fight was over, and congratulated him on his well-doing in 
active battle. 

“You’ve done bravely, I hear, Lino, and I’m glad of it.” 

“Yes,” he said, with a softer chuckle than before. “ They 
called me a coward, but I tried to do my duty. ’Tain’t 
always the frisky ox that’s at the far end of the yoke.” 

That long friendless man showed, in his way, his inten- 
tion of doing what God would have him do. Who of us 
has better improved his opportunities? 1 


An even more striking encouragement, in the way 
of result, came from a tardy recognition of the rights 
of those who lack other advantages to a saving knowl- 
edge of Jesus Christ. 


Among the recruits picked up in Connecticut, for the 
sake of the bounty, in the later years of the Civil War, were 
some men who would not have been accepted in the army on 
their merit. One such man in our regiment was below the 
physical standard, and he seemed beneath a fair average of 
intelligence. He was a laughing-stock in the regiment. He 
was not competent for a soldier’s duty. He was unable 
to drill. So he was put at a menial duty, and became a 
byword and a butt. I do not think that it occurred to me, 
at that time, that he was a proper subject for religious con- 
versation. I am speaking of what was, not of what ought 
to have been. Possibly the confession of my lack will suggest 
to some one else the impropriety of such a failure. 

One day, in St. Augustine, as I was walking on the para- 
pet of the old Spanish fort, I came upon this man. No 
one else was just then in sight, and it seemed as if it would 
be taking nothing from others if I said a word to him. So 
{ stopped to talk with him. Calling him by his regimental 
nickname, I asked: : 

“Do you ever pray?” : 


1 Pages 95-98. 


; 
: 
q 
, 
; : 
: 





Encouragements and Incentives 149 


“JT say ‘Oure Farther,’” was his thick and drawling 
response. 

“Who is your Father?” I asked. 

That question he couldn’t answer. He had only, by some 
ene, been taught by rote to say the words of that prayer. 
Then I took him as a little child,—as, indeed, he was a little 
child in intellect; and I told him of God as his loving Father 
in heaven, who would be glad to have him pray to him. And 
I told of Jesus and his love. He listened like a glad child 
who was taking in a child’s lesson, and he seemed to com- 
prehend what I was saying, as well as any of us can com- 
prehend these truths. From that time I had a new interest 
in that soldier boy, and he seemed to be showing signs of 
awakened life. He welcomed my interest in him, and he 
responded gratefully to every word of counsel or suggestion 
from me. I reproached myself that I had not been readier 
to estimate him as God estimates every soul whom the 
Saviour loves and died for. 


The immediate response of this needy and neg- 
lected child of God to the story of the Father’s love 
had been a surprise and an encouragement to the chap- 
lain. But who but the Father himself could have fore- 
seen the end? 


After the war was over I was, one Sunday evening, to 
make an address in a Connecticut city. As I entered the 
outer door of the prominent church, a bright-faced young 
man stepped forward to greet me, calling me by name. As 
I looked the second time, I saw that it was that anything but 
hopeful soldier whom I first talked with on the parapet of 
the old Spanish fort in St. Augustine. On inquiry, I found 
that he had made a public confession of his faith in one of 
the prominent churches in that city, and that he was wit- 
nessing a good confession. He was a regular attendant in 
the Sunday-school. As I looked at him, I hoped that I had 
been of some service to him; for I was sure he had taught 
me a good lesson,—a lesson that I want to pass on to 


1 Pages 99-101. 


150 Taking Men Alive 


others. Any soul that Jesus loves is worth our best work in 
its behalf.’ 


Still another remarkable instance of this kind of 
work is found in the following experience of a mus- 
sionary, President Browne of Harpoot College in Tur- 
key: 


One evening I was riding into one of our lowest vil- 
lages in eastern Turkey, and my horse almost stepped upon 
something in the mire. As I looked, I saw a little hump- 
backed girl. When she opened her mouth, her utterance 
was more foul than the mud and mire beneath her. Arriving 
at the teacher’s house, I spoke to him about that little hump- 
backed girl, and he said: “Don’t tell me anything about that 
girl; she is a lost soul.” I worked five days there in that 
village to persuade the parents of this little girl to allow 
her to come to our school. Within a year her heart had 
melted, a character had begun to develop, and her face became 
bright and hopeful. As the years went by, she developed a 
marvelous capacity for patience and love, and when from the 
villages came especially hard cases, we would bring them to 
her. When she graduated, she was made the principal teacher 
in our college. She had rare talents for teaching; we had 
never seen anything like it before. But one day she came to 


me and said: “I am not contented to be a teacher in the 
college.” “ Why not?” I asked. ‘“ Why are you not satisfied 
here?” “T want to go,” she replied, “to the places where 


others do not wish to go.” So I sent her out to a place on 
the northern branch of the Euphrates, where she did a work 
that none of our teachers had been able to do. She intro- 
duced the gospel and founded four churches. Think of it! 
This “lost soul” had founded four churches, in spite of her 
deformity and the early influences of her life. 


Is Any Opportunity Too Slight ? 


There is no such thing as a “ trifling ” opportunity 
in the work of soul-winning; no opportunity so slight 


1 Pages 101-102. 


Encouragements and Incentives 151 


that it may safely be passed by as not worth improv- 
ing. A teacher of a Bible class saw, late one week-day 
afternoon in winter, a member of the class hurrying by 
his house. The man was going home from his work, 
that of a house-painter. The teacher waved a greet- 
ing to him through the window, but the man failed to 
see it. Thereupon something prompted the teacher 
to hurry out of the house, bareheaded, after his friend. 
He caught him at the corner, and they stood together 
chatting. Upon the teacher’s asking the painter how 
he had been, he replied that he had had a pretty bad 
spell of sickness a few nights before. “TI tell you,” he 
said, “it makes a man think pretty hard when it seems 
as though everything was dropping away from him.” 

“But you’re all ready to go whenever you are 
called, Joe?” asked his teacher with a hearty smile. 

“T don’t know about that,’ was the sober answer. 
“Sometimes I think I am, and then again I don’t 
know.” This came as a genuine surprise to the 
teacher, who had supposed that the man was in no 
doubt as to his relation to Christ. 

It took but a few minutes’ earnest talk there on the 
street corner to show this troubled soul that he need 
not be in doubt another moment. A meeting with the 
pastor was suggested, and gladly agreed to; and at the 
next communion service of the church the painter 
stood up and gave public expression to his acceptance 
of the Saviour who would have all men ready for his 
coming. Would he have been thus ready if that 
teacher had felt that his duty was fully discharged in 
class on Sundays, or that the casual passing of his 
house was too slight an opportunity for a show of 
interest, 


iby Taking Men Alive 


A personal experience impressed a Christian busi- 
ness man with the measureless gain of counting no 
opportunity too slight. 


He was on hits way to an international convention of 
Young Men’s Christian Associations in Montreal. As the 
train approached that city, a bright young man came into 
the car as a representative of a prominent hotel in Montreal, 
seeking guests for his hostelry. My friend inquired as to the 
location and advantages of the house, in view of the heat 
of summer, then, prevailing. At once the young man waxed 
eloquent over the subject, and fairly convinced his hearer 
that this was the place for him. 

As my informant arranged for a room there, he asked 
pleasantly of the zealous advocate: 

“My young friend, are you a follower of Jesus?” 

“TI can’t say I am, sir,’ was the reply. 

“Well, if you were in Christ’s service, and would plead 
as earnestly for his cause as you do for the hotel you now 
represent, you would be a valuable helper to your Master, 
and you might do a great deal of good to others. I wish 
you were in Christ’s service, using your powers for him.” 

The young man passed on through the car, and my friend 
went his way to the city, having simply said this word for his 
Master, as was his wont. It did not seem to be an excep- 
tionally hopeful occasion, but who can tell? 

Several years passed. My friend sat, one day, in his pri- 
vate office in a New England city. As he called out a 
question to some one in the hallway, his pleasant voice 
sounded through the building. Almost immediately a strange 
young man appeared at the office door, and said: 

“Excuse me, sir; but, may I ask, did you not attend 
a convention in Montreal, about the first of July, a few sum- 
mers ago?” 

“Yes, I did, as I well remember; but what of that?” 

“Do you remember speaking to a young man on the 
cars, and telling him you wished he would work for Jesus 
as faithfully as he was then working for a hotel in Mon- 
treal?” 

“T think I do, now that you recall it.” 


Encouragements and Incentives 153 


“Well, J cannot forget it. Your words rang in my ears. 
They resulted in bringing me into the service of Jesus, and 
now I am trying to speak words for him wherever I go. 
Being in this city on business to-day, I came into this build- 
ing [where were the rooms of the Young Men’s Christian 
Association ], and as I was near your door I heard that 
voice which has been sounding in my memory all these years, 
and I have come to thank you for what you have done for 
me.” 

That delegate to the international convention of Young 
Men’s Christian Associations did more by his word to an 
individual for Christ than if he had made half a dozen elo- 
quent addresses in the convention.1 


Bishop C. C. McCabe told of an illustration out of 
his experience that impressed him with the worth of 
the opportunity which most of us would consider no 
opportunity at all: 


At one time in a strange city, as the hackman got down 
from his box and opened the door to let me out, I paid him, 
and grasping his hand said, “ Good-night, I hope to meet 
you again in glory.” I then went into the house, met my 
host, and retired. About midnight my host knocked at my 
door and said: “Chaplain, that hackman has come back, 
and says he has got to see you to-night.” When the broad- 
shouldered, rough-looking man, with whip in hand, was 
shown up, the tears rolling down his cheeks like rain, he 
said, “If I meet you in glory, I have got to turn round. I 
have come to ask you to pray with me.” 


How mistaken we are when we attempt to measure 
opporiunity by man-made rules! 


As John B. Gough said of the one loving word of Joel 
Stratton that won him: “My friend, it may be a small 
matter for you to speak the one word for Christ that wins 
a needy soul—a small matter to you, but it is everything to 


1Pages 163-166. 


154 Taking Men Alive 


him.” It is forgetting this truth that causes personal work to 
be neglected.’ 


How often—or how seldom !—do we think of those 
who serve us in public places, such as waiters, street- 
car and railway-train conductors, and sleeping-car 
porters, as being souls for whom we have any respon- 
sibility? A prominent Sunday-school leader, W. C. 
Pearce of Chicago, told the writer of a pleasant sur- 
prise he once had when he improved an opportunity 
that most of us would have counted “too slight.” 
Here is the incident in his own words: 


I took the train at the Lake Shore Depot, Chicago, for a 
town in northern Indiana. I was very tired, and, although 
it was during the day, I took a seat in the sleeper, and almost 
before we had left Chicago I was asleep. I had instructed the 
porter to waken me before I reached my destination; accord- 
ingly, as we neared the end of the journey, he came in and 
aroused me. A few minutes later he returned to brush my 
clothes and help me with my baggage. 

As he was brushing me off I remarked: “My journey 
ends before yours to-day, doesn’t it?” 

“Yes, suh,” was the answer. 

“T wonder which of us will come to the end of the jour- 
ney of life first?” 

“T don’t know, suh, I don’t like to think about dat, sth.” 

“Well,” said I, “it doesn’t matter much if one has a 
through ticket.” 

The man looked puzzled, and said, “I don’t know what 
you mean, suh.” 

Then I explained to him that I had secured a ticket at 
Chicago, which was nothing more nor less than a promise of 
a ride, properly signed by the railroad officials. And I pulled 
from my pocket a small copy of the Bible, and spoke of 
Christ’s free offer of salvation, quoting some one of the 
promises, and explained that this promise was signed and 
sealed by the death of Jesus Christ, and that I had accepted 


1 Pages 175-176. 





Encouragements and Incentives 155 


that promise and was trusting fully in the journey’s ending 
right. 

With a very happy face, which I shall never forget, he 
responded, “Bless de Lawd, I have that.” And he added, 
“TI have been a porter for many years, but you are the first 
gentleman that ever spoke to me about Jesus Christ.” 


If, indeed, we let ourselves ever admit that any 
opportunity may be too trifling to use, we are sure to 
miss real opportunities that are close by us. It is only 
by persistent practise in seizing every opportunity that 
we shall gain the keenness that can see an opportunity 
where most people would see none. We need not be 
afraid of seeing too many. For we miss so many! 
Think of the attitude among Christian people gen- 
erally that would make such an occurrence as the fol- 
lowing possible, among intended ministers of the gos- 
pel! 

An active worker for individuals was visiting a well- 
known divinity school in order to have an interview with a 
student. While waiting for that student he was improving 
his time, as usual, by seeking individual souls near him. En- 
countering a janitor, or other helper, in the hall, he had a 
pleasant, direct talk with him. He found a soul waiting to be 
helped. He led that soul to the Saviour. In conversation he 
found that although that soul had been long in the vicinity 
of embryo preachers, not a word had been spoken to him by 
one of them. They were waiting to be eloquent to a full 
congregation. Why should they waste their strength on a 
single soul? That is an illustrative incident, even if it is not 
an instructive one.? 


Those closest to us may be most in need of the per- 
sonal word for Christ. Only as we carry the commis- 
sion ever-present in our thoughts, to be obeyed as we 
go about our daily business, in school or college, in 


1 Page 174. 


156 Taking Men Alive 


the home-circle itself, in boarding-house or hotel, on 
train and boat, have we any assurance against missing 
priceless opportunities for soul-saving. Our morning 
prayer should anticipate it as the biggest thing in the 
day ahead. Our evening prayer should review the day 
in relation to this. ‘Lovest thou me? Feed my 
sheep.” * 


Individual Work Always Needed 


For nothing else will ever take the place of indi- 
vidual work in bringing souls into the Kingdom. With- 
out it, some are sure to be missed. Faithfulness in 
pulpit or Sunday-school class or prayer-meeting are 
good accompaniments of it, but never substitutes for 
it. After the Civil War was over the chaplain had 
occasion to realize this, in his continued efforts both as 
preacher and individual worker. 


A regimental “pioneer corps” did peculiar army service, 
and its members often exhibited high qualities of courage and 
daring. They would go before our column to cut a way 
through forest or bushes, or to construct a bridge or road, 
sometimes under the enemy’s sharp fire. To fill their place 
and do their work was to win honor and regard from officers 
and men. They would quickly construct a shelter for an off- 
cer, which gave him protection and comfort, as he stopped for 
a night or a week. In doing this they showed rare skill and 
taste, and made themselves indispensable to the command as 
a whole. 

Some months after the war I was announced to speak, one 
Sunday evening, in a prominent church in Western Massa- 
chusetts. As I rose in the pulpit I saw in the congregation 
a well-remembered sergeant in our “pioneer corps.” He was 
one of the bravest of the brave, always prompt and ready in 


2John 21:17. 





Encouragements and Incentives 157 


whatever he had to do. Hearing that I was to speak, he had 
come to listen to his old chaplain. The pastor in whose pulpit 
I stood told me afterwards that this veteran soldier had a 
good name in the community, although he was not a church: 
member. At once I felt that I must reach him for Christ. 
The chaplain must be faithful that night to the pioneer corps 
sergeant. 

At the close of the service the brave old “ pioneer” came 
forward to give me greeting. After a talk about our cam- 
paigning together, I asked him if he wouldn’t go with me for 
a talk to the parsonage, where I was to pass the night. This 
he was glad to do. By the pastor’s consent I had a room 
where we could be by ourselves. In a free talk with my 
old comrade, I found him ready and glad to commit himself 
wholly to Christ. He only needed to know what to do, and 
to be helped to do it. When I asked him if he was ready and 
willing to take this step now, he assured me that he was. 
At this we went on our knees together, and the brave 
soldier of country became a trustful soldier of Christ. As I 
knew of him afterwards, I felt that he was one of many who 
needed only the being enlisted to be ready for active, per- 
sistent service. 


Yet if the chaplain had let his work cease with his 
pulpit address that night, the enlistment might never 
have been made. 

The best of prayer-meetings, no matter how well- 
conducted and spiritual, will never accomplish the 
work of individually seeking the individual. A young 
Christian army officer once taught needed lessons in 
this line. 


In each city to which he was assigned he naturally went 
to the Young Men’s Christian Association as a hopeful center 
and starting-point. There he usually found the weekly prayer- 
meeting as perhaps the highest point of spiritual devotion. 
But this was, to his mind, too much after the pattern of an 


1 Pages 105-108. 


158 Taking Men Alive 


ordinary church service, where the congregation was largely 
of church-members and church-goers, while he wanted to 
reach those who were still outside, but who were compelled 
to come in, against their ordinary preferences and inclinations, 
Hence to this work he vigorously set himself at once. 

Going into such a prayer-meeting, early in the evening, 
at one time, he asked the leaders how many persons had been 
sought out from the highways and byways that evening. On 
being told that nothing of the sort had been done, he asked 
that all should kneel at once in prayer, offering an ejaculation 
of consecration to this service, and of petition for help in this 
service, and then all should scatter to the street corners and 
drinking-places and gambling-houses, seeking souls, and urg- 
ing them to come in where they could be helped. Fifteen 
minutes or more later they were to return to the Association 
rooms, and then they might have a hopeful prayer-meeting 
there. The first experiment was an eminent success, and its 
every repetition seemed an improvement on this. More of 
those for whom they had there hoped and prayed were gath- 
ered in in a single evening, under this plan of work, than 
under the old plan, or the no plan, in any one year before. 

Of course, the good results of this kind of effort were a 
surprise to those who had supposed that being willing to pay 
for a seat in church, or being willing to look up for themselves 
a regular religious service, was an essential preliminary to 
being a hopeful member of a regular congregation. This has 
been so, in fact, for centuries. In this case gamblers gave up 
gambling, drunkards gave up drinking, scoffers gave up scoff- 
ing, doubters gave up doubting, and those who had been counted 
as outcasts became glad and grateful followers of the Lord 
Jesus, urging their old associates to receive life instead of death, 
as they had already accepted it. In one instance a rumseller, 
influenced by his now rescued customers, abandoned his vile 
pursuit and became an active recruiting officer for the Cap- 
tain of his Salvation. Such results as this are natural when 
souls are sought one at a time by one who is in loving, ie 
earnestness, intent in pursuit of that one soul.? © 


And a young man who had been won to Christ by 


1 Pages 156-159. 





| 


Encouragements and Incentives 159 


the simple word of individual appeal from a stranger 
wrote in an agony of earnestness: 


“O Mr. Trumbull! you cannot urge the followers of 
Jesus in too strong terms to talk more of him. A kind word 
may save a soul! That soul may save a thousand! Do they 
realize it? When I remember, at times, how my soul has 
longed, when a mere boy, a stranger in a great city, for some 
one to take an interest in me and my soul’s welfare, I feel as 
though I should fly away for fear there is some one near me 
smothering the same awful feelings, and longing for that 
kind word of Christian sympathy. 

“TI remember very well, the morning J packed my things 
to go and fill that situation in that city, how my mother 
prayed for me, and said, as she thought of the temptations I 
should be subject to, ‘O William, how I wish you were a 
Christian!’ I wished so too. She hoped all would be right. 
When, that day, I went into the garden to say good-by to 
father, as he saw me coming he turned his head to hide the 
tears, and he reached out his calloused hand, calloused for 
me, and said: ‘You are going away from home, William, 
and all you have in this world is your good name. Keep 
that. Attend church every Sabbath regularly somewhere, 
and you will come out all right.’ I promised him I would. 
I went away very sad, but determined to keep my promise. 

“For one whole year, Sabbath after Sabbath, I attended 
one church and sat in the same seat, and no one ever intimated 
that he. thought I had a soul; and I was never sufficiently 
acquainted with a member of the church or congregation to 
be on speaking terms; yet, at times, my sense of guilt was 
overwhelming, and oh for a friend!”.... 

How many souls there are waiting and longing to be 
blessed, as that Vermont boy waited and longed in his first 
year away from home! One day, on Broadway, I noticed a 
trowd about a little child. Pushing in among others, I saw 
that it was a strayed child. He was lost, and he knew no way 
of finding himself or his dear ones. Seeing my look of ten- 
der sympathetic interest in him, the child looked up, and 
stretched out his hand to me, saying, in pleading tones, 
“Won’t you please to show me my way home?” That cry 


160 Taking Men Alive 


has been sounding in my ears ever since, when I find myseli 
near a wandering soul like that Vermont boy in the city, 
and like others who are about us on every side, as we ride 
and as we walk. There is work enough to do for Christ if 
only we will help the individuals near us who need our help, 
and who are ready to be helped. 


Pressing for an Immediate Decision 


As to seeing definite results of our efforts in indi- 
vidual soul-winning, that may or may not be our privi- 
lege. Our chief concern must be the giving of the 
invitation to come to Christ. The results are between 
Christ and the individual. Sometimes, perhaps often, 
we shall not know what the outcome is. Again, it may 
be our duty to press for immediate results, for instant 
decision. An illustration of this occurred in one of 
Dr. Trumbull’s railroad train experiences. 


One morning, as I was riding on a train in Western 
Connecticut, I saw a young man whom I had seen at a relig- 
ious meeting the evening before. I had never seen him ex- 
cept at that time; but there was a deep religious interest just 
then in the church where I had seen him, and accordingly T 
took a seat by his side and began conversation on the subject. 
He seemed glad to be spoken to about it, and I said I hoped 
he would enter into Christ’s service with the others there 
who were doing so. He said he wished it were so. 

“Then why isn’t it so?” I asked. ‘“ You have nothing 
to do but to commit yourself at once to the loving Saviour 
as his servant and follower. He is more ready to accept 
you than you are to offer yourself.” 

“Do you mean, Mr. Trumbull, that here on this car-seat, 
just now, I can give myself to the Saviour, and he will accept 
me without any further preparation on my part?” 

“T mean just that,” I said. “The Saviour is ready when 
you are, There is no gain in your waiting; and no further 


1 Pages 39-43. 


Encouragements and Incentives 161 


preparation is needed than for you to be ready to give your- 
self to him and to trust him unhesitatingly.” 

He said not a word more about himself, but he gave evi- 
dence of a loving, trustful soul, when he reached out in 
ti.ought after another, saying: 

“Mr. Trumbull, ’ve a brother who ought to be a follower 
of Christ. I wish you could talk to him.” 

That is one of the first evidences of the Christian spirit 
and life,—an interest in another soul, and the forgetting of 
self in that care for another. 


Another occasion when the securing of an immedi- 
ate decision for Christ was a plain duty of the indi- 
vidual worker occurred in an army interview: 


One evening, as I was returning to my evening quarters, 
I saw the gleam of a faint light through a low shelter-tent in 
our regimental camp. It was long after “Lights Out” had 
been sounded, and I stooped and scratched at the tent entrance 
as a signal that I wanted to enter. A call, “Come in,” re- 
sponded, and I crept in. A soldier, seated on the ground, 
was writing home by a small tallow candle, and I knew that 
any soldier was in an accessible mood when thinking of his 
home. So I talked with him about home. A sister, a devoted 
Christian, was, he said, very dear to him. She had urged 
him to yield himself to Christ, and he was writing to her that 
very evening. 

I felt that the occasion was a peculiar one, and I must 
improve it. I urged him to a decision at that very time, and 
I would not consent that he should postpone it. I saw that 
all he needed was to come to the act of decision, and there 
might never be a better moment for this with him than now. 
So there I remained with him, pleading for Christ until far 
into the night. I knew that there would probably never be 
“a more convenient season” than this. And his strong New 
England mind evidently took in this fact. He was consid- 
ering the matter well. Finally, he voluntarily knelt with 
me beneath that shelter-tent, and deliberately consecrated 
himself to the Saviour’s care and service. At this I rejoiced 


1 Pages 36-38. 


162 Taking Men Alive 


with him, and thanked my God and his. Then, giving my 
hand to him, I went on to my quarters with a happier heart. 

It was but a little while after this, that, in an engage- 
ment in which we had a part, he was killed; and as I 
said earnest words of prayer over the grave in which we 
buried him, and as I looked down into his dead face, I was 
glad that I waited that memorable night until he knelt by my 
side and gave himself up to his loving and waiting Saviour. 


In civil life as well as in war-time we may face op- 
portunities where the duty of pressing for instant de- 
cision is a plain one. The following experience made a 
life-long impression on the one who was privileged, 
because willing, to be God’s representative. 


One Sunday I passed with a near relative. There I met 
a gentleman whom I had never seen before, but who was 
connected with my relative. I sat with him at the table, and 
we had pleasant conversation. In the evening this gentleman 
was out at a church service, and the lady of the house was 
suffering with a headache. I urged her to retire, while I 
would sit up and close the house after the visitor came in. 
As I did this, I sat by the sitting-room fire, on the cold winter 
night. When the visitor was in, and the house was closed, we 
still sat together there. 

He spoke of the service that he had attended, and he was 
evidently much impressed by the sermon. 

“You don’t often hear a sermon like that, especially from 
such a minister,’ he said. “The minister brought us right up 
face to face with the Judgment Seat, and there he left us. 
There were no soft words to ease us down, such as, ‘ But J 
trust this is not for you, my brethren.’ ” 

Then, as if soliloquizing, as he sat there looking into the 
fire, he added: 

“TI tell you that, in the great day, we who go over to the 
left hand will not feel very kindly toward the men who have 
glossed this thing over, when they had a chance to tell us 
the plain truth.” 


1 Pages 8a-gz. 


: 





Encouragements and Incentives 163 


The impressed man was much older than myself, old 
enough, perhaps, to be my father; but he had been brought 
to my side in a condition of mind to need help; and I was 
there to speak for Jesus. It was not a question of seniority, 
nor of long acquaintance, to be considered by one who repre- 
sented the Eternal. Laying my hand lovingly on his knee, as 
he sat by my side looking thoughtfully into the fire, I said: 

“My friend, what do you mean by speaking of ‘we who 
go over to the left hand’? You belong on the right hand, 
and you ought to recognize this. The judge is your Saviour. 
You ought to trust him fully as such.” 

“TI suppose I ought to,” he responded. 

“Well, do you not?” 

Pelucattesay|.do. 

At this I drew my chair around so that I could look 
directly into his face, and I said earnestly, feeling the full 
force of my words: 

“This is God’s doing, and you must recognize it. God 
has brought us to this house to meet for the first time in our 
lives. He has planned it so that you should go out to that 
evening service, and hear that impressive appeal. And now, 
while all others in the house are asleep, you and I sit here 
facing the question of questions for your soul. I cannot leave 
you until you settle it. I speak for the Saviour when I urge 
you to commit yourself to him for now and forevermore.” 

Then, reaching out my hand, I said: 

“My friend, you realize what all this means, and its impor- 
tance. Now, promise me that this night, before you sleep, you 
will, on your knees, tell your loving, longing, waiting Saviour, 
that you’ve delayed this thing altogether too long, but that you 
won’t do so any longer. Tell him that you trust him because 
he is the Saviour, and you are one whom he wants to save. 
Give me your hand on this, my friend, and then go to your 
room and do what you know to be your duty.” 

My companion evidently felt that it was a crisis hour with 
him, and he could not evade the sense of this. My hand was 
outstretched to him. For some time he said not a word, but I 
saw he was quivering with intense emotion. Meanwhile I 
was praying in my heart for a blessing on him in his xonflict 
of soul. Then, with a convulsive movement that shook his 


164 Taking Men Alive 


strong frame, he put out his right hand and clasped mine as 
though it were for life. I realized that he had given himself 
to his Saviour. Rising, I asked God’s blessing on him, and 
bade him good-night, and we parted. I went to my room for 
the night, and to pray for him, and he went to his room to 
pray for himself. 

Before he came downstairs in the morning I left for my 
home. I never saw him again. Before the day closed he left 
that house for his home. By a severe railroad accident, on 
his way home,»he was fatally injured, and soon he was with 
the Saviour to whom he had trusted himself.1 


Of one thing we may be sure, and we must make 
this unmistakably plain to those whom we would win: 
Jesus Christ accepts at once. If there is any delay, it 
is not of Christ’s causing. This truth is not so coin- 
monly understood as we might suppose. Its need is 
illustrated in a case already considered.’ 


When I met him the next morning I asked him if he had 
done as he promised to. As he said that he had, I inquired 
if he felt that the Saviour had accepted him. 

“T don’t suppose that he has yet,’ was his reply. 

“Why not?” I inquired. 

“T don’t suppose that Jesus Christ would accept me at 
once,” he said. 

“Well, then the responsibility is with him. I don’t see that 
you have anything more to do about it,” was my reply. 

“What do you mean?” he asked, with a surprised look. 

“Why, if you have gone to the only Saviour there is, and 
have offered yourself to him, telling him you are willing to 
shape your course by his directions, and he is not ready to 
accept you, but wants to wait a while, there seems to be noth- 
ing else for you to do.” 

“Do you mean,” he asked, “that I ought to believe that 
Jesus Christ at once accepts me, and that I can fully trust 
him now as my Saviour?” 


1 Pages 67-71. 
2In Chapter VII, pages 125-128, of this volume 


—— ee 





Encouragements and Incentives 165 


“That certainly is the way I understand it,” I said. “TI 
can’t see any other way. It seems to be that or nothing.” 

“Then I’ll do that,” he said earnestly, and he evidently 
meant what he said. 


Vital Importance of Follow-Up Work 


We certainly have a responsibility to work for re- 
sults just so long as the result does not appear in one 
who is still within our range of influence. The need 
and duty of “follow-up” work here are as vital as 
in every other field of effort. Our failure to follow up 
a preliminary endeavor, which was good as far as it 
went, may mean complete failure so far as that soul 
is concerned. Yet how few are willing to be as per- 
sistent as was a student of whom Henry Drummond 
told ?—here is the story in Drummond’s own words: 


One night I got a letter from one of the students of the 
University of Edinburgh, page after page of agnosticism and 
atheism. I went over to see him, and spent a whole afternoon 
with him, and did not make the slightest impression. At 
Edinburgh University we have a Students’ Evangelistic Meet- 
ing on Sunday nights, at which there are eight hundred or one 
thousand men present. A few nights after this, I saw that 
man in the meeting, and next to him sat another man whom I 
had seen occasionally at the meetings. I did not know his 
[the latter’s] name, but I wanted to find out more about my 
skeptic, so when the meeting was over, I went up to him and 
said, ‘Do you happen to know ——?” 

“Yes,” he replied, “it is he that has brought me to Edin- 
burgh.” 

“ Are you an old friend?” I asked. 

“ IT am an American, a graduate of an American Univer- 
sity,’ he said. “ After I had finished there I wanted to take 
a post-graduate course, and finally decided to come to Edin- 
burgh. In the dissecting-room I happened to be placed next 


1 Pages 64-65. 


166 Taking Men Alive 


to ——, and I took a singular liking for him. I found out that 
he was a man of very remarkable ability, though not a relig- 
ious man, and I thought I might be able to do something for 
him. A year passed and he was just where I found him.” 

He [the skeptic] certainly was blind enough, because it 
was only two or three weeks before that that he wrote me that 
letter. “JI think you said,” I resumed, “that you only came 
here to take a year of the post-graduate course.” 

“Well,” he said, “I packed my trunks to go home, and I 
thought of this friend, and I wondered whether a year of my 
life would be bétter spent to go and start in my profession 
in America, or to stay in Edinburgh and try to win that one 
man for Christ, and I stayed.” 

“Well,” I said, “my dear fellow, it will pay you; you will 
get that man.” 

“Two or three months passed, and it came to the last night 
of our meetings. We have men in Edinburgh from every part 
of the world. Every year, five or six hundred of them go out 
never to meet again, and in our religious work we get very 
close to one another, and on the last night of the year we sit 
down together in our common hall tothe Lord’s Supper. This 
is entirely a students’ meeting. On that night we get in the 
members of the Theological Faculty, so that things may be 
done decently and in order. Hundreds of men are there, the 
cream of the youth of the world, sitting down at the Lord’s 
table. Many of them are not members of the Church, but are 
there for the first time pledging themselves to become members 
of the Kingdom of God. I saw sitting down and handing 
the communion cup to his American friend. He had got his 
man. A week after he was back in his own country. I do 





not know his name. . . . He was a subject of Christ’s 
kingdom, doing His work in silence and in humility. A few 
weeks passed and —— came to see me. I said, “ What do you 


come here for?” 

He said, “I want to tell you I am going to be a medical 
missionary,” 

It was worth a year, was it not?! 


1From ‘The Life of Henry Drummond,” by George Adam Smith, 
pages 364-366. 


i i - 


Encouragements and Incentives 167 


Sometimes we may be surprised to find that one is 
confidently expecting to be followed up, and would 
lose faith in us if we disappointed him. An illustra- 
tion of the importance of this kind of “ follow-up” 
work is found in the following experience of Dr. 
Trumbull’s: 


On one occasion, I met, in civil life, a fellow-officer, whom 
I honored and looked up to. In a strange place, we were in 
crowded quarters, where there was not a separate bed for 
each. In consequence, we two, who had slept on the field 
under the same blanket, shared the same hotel bed. Our 
army experiences made each of us more willing to consent to 
this arrangement than if we had not been in the army. My 
kneeling in prayer, before I lay down, opened the way for a 
close and loving talk on the precious relations which are 
between those who are one in Christ,—a union closer than 
that of fellow-soldiers. 

My officer friend, although reverent toward Christ and his 
salvation, was not ready to express his personal trust in the 
Saviour. As I tenderly urged him to commit himself to the 
one Saviour, he confessed that he was not ready to do so, be- 
cause of a veason that he deemed sufficient. As we con- 
versed that night on the subject, he told me that if a certain 
state of things should ever exist, he would be ready to take 
the step, as he was not now. That night’s conversation and 
my officer friend’s conditional promise were stored in my mind, 
and he was a subject of my prayers. 

As the months passed on, the state of things which he 
suggested as likely to change his view as to his personal duty 
came about. When I knew of this change in affairs, J had his 
promise in mind, and in the early morning I presented myself 
at his home. 

“T told my wife that the chaplain would be up here to 
see me, after this,” was the greeting that he gave me, as I 
entered his home. What if I had failed to remember my 
promise at a time lke this? 

That brave officer was ready to do his duty. He openly 
took a stand for Christ. His influence over others was great. 


168 Taking Men Alive 


He became known throughout the land as a Christian. If 1 
had never been the means of winning any other to a confession 
of the Saviour, I should feel that all my labors with indi- 
viduals were more than repaid by the result of that one 
evening’s talk with this soldier of country and of Christ.1 


We must labor as though the whole responsibility 
for another’s eternal choice rested upon us, while we 
rejoice in the knowledge that it is not we alone that 
work, “ for it is God who worketh in you both to will 
and to work, for his good pleasure.’’? 


Topics and Questions for Study and Discussion 


(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 


1. What is one of the most frequent of the encourage: 
ments in this work? 

2. Why is no case ever hopeless? 

3. Why are rebuffs in this work so rare? 

4. Why are the mentally deficient even more likely than 
others to respond to the individual appeal? 

5. What reason did John B. Gough give why no opportunity 
is too slight? 

6. Why ought we really to be thinking more about the 
“trifling” opportunities than about the obviously 

greater ones? 

7. Why is it that the preaching service and the prayer- 
meeting can never take the place of individual work in 
winning souls? 

8. When is it a duty to expect and work for an immediate 
result ? 

9. What vital truth must we make plain to those whom wé 
would win, as to the time of Christ’s acceptance? 

10. When have we a duty to do “ follow-up” work? 


1 Pages 108-110. * Philippians 2: 13. 


HOW OUR LORD WORKED 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 
(For study before reading this chapter) 


Which is the more important question for Chris- 
tians to answer: “ What would Jesus do?” 
or, “ What would Jesus have me do?” Why? 

How far have we reason to believe that Christ 
would do to-day, if he were a man on earth, 
as he did nineteen centuries ago? 

What instances can you recall of Christ’s indi- 
vidual work? 

Upon which should you say the emphasis of 
Christ’s teaching lay: death, or life? Give 
Gospel passages in proof. 

Under what circumstances did Christ criticize 
or condemn men? Cite instances. 

What principles of individual work, as ascer- 
tained in these studies, are illustrated in 
Christ’s work on earth? Cite an instance 
that illustrates each principle. 








ORE AIS 


Rk oe 


rX 
HOW OUR LORD WORKED 


T is a truth often missed that, while we have work to 
do for Christ, we have not Christ’s work to do. He 
did many things, some of which we ought not to do, 
others of which we could not do if we would. It is 
important to bear this in mind as we make a study of 
any part of our Lord’s work. We are not Messiahs. 
We are not Saviours. We are not to seek to imitate 
the details of all that the Messiah and Saviour did. 
But we are his messengers and representatives, and we 
must work in accordance with his principles. 

Let us now test the principles that we have already 
found to be important in soul-winning, by ascertain- 
ing whether they seem to have the confirmation of 
Christ’s own practise and teachings. 


The Individual in First Place 


That the winning of and caring for the individual 


SN, ~ 
rs 


worn, 


soul is the most important work in the Kingdom, given Je hn 


preferred place by Christ for himself and for ourselves, 
we have already seen in our recognition of the place 
of the paradox in the Way of Life.1 Christ’s teach- 
ing as to this is unmistakable. Seven of the eleven 
apostles who remained true to him were won by the 
personal appeal to them as individuals*; and probably 


1See pages 31, 32 of this volume, 2See page 36 of this volume. 
ivi 


Be: 35-5 
Matt. 9:¢ 
Mark 
I 3 19,20 


Matt. 
ReliGe Wa 4 he 
25 : 31-46 


John 
17:25, 26 


John 

15: 27, 
margin; 
20 : 21: 
ER SST A® 
Mark 
10; 46-52 


172 Taking Men Alive 


the other four were,—the circumstances of their win- 
ning are not recorded. Again, the ninety and nine are 
to be left in order to seek and find the one lost. In 
the picture of the judgment one’s eternal life or death 
is determined by the test of having ministered “ unto 
one of these my brethren, even these least.’’ On the 
evening before his crucifixion, alone in the upper room 
with his trusted eleven friends, Jesus prayed to the 
Father in joyous acknowledgment of the completion 
of the work for which he had lived: “ These [my 
disciples} knew that thou didst send me; and I made 
known unto them thy name, and will make it known; 
that the love wherewith thou lovedst me may be in 
them, and I in them.” He was not thinking now of 
the multitudes that he had addressed, but of the little 
group of individuals that he had won; his life-work 
was a success because these few had been won. And 
the work for which he had come, and in which he had 
thus succeeded, was the work which he committed, for 
its continuance, to them and to us: “and bear ye also 
witness, because ye have been with me.” “As the 
Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” “ Ye are 
my friends, if ye do the things which I command you.” 
The cry of the individual rang louder and carried 
more weight with our Lord than the word of the 
crowd. Jesus turned from the many to ascertain the 
need of one, and to meet that need. 


A Misston of Winning, Not o osin 


Christ’s mission was to win men to him, not to 
drive them from him. He came not to tell chiefly 
about sin and death, but about salvation and life. To 
dwell on the dark side drives men from us; to dwell 


How Our Lord Worked 173 


on the bright side draws them to us, if they can be 
won at all. And we find the emphasis of the Gospels 
unmistakable on this point. “In him was life; and 
the life was the light of men....There was the true 
light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming 
into the world.” “For God sent not the Son into 
the world to judge the world; but that the world should 
be saved through him.” “ The Father that sent me, he 
hath given me a commandment, what I should say, and 
what I should speak. And I know that his command- 
ment is life eternal.” 

Not only was the whole purpose and mission of 
Jesus Christ to win men, but his method of revealing 
his mission was to use a bait that would win at the 
start, if possible. He did this by the use of the two 
kinds of bait the value of which we have already 
seen: comnmending the good in men, rather than criti- 
cizing the evil; and giving their present interests 
prominent place to begin with, 


Beginning With Men *s Present Interests 


One of the most memorable instances of Christ’s 
recognition of men’s temporal interests as a first step 
in winning them to him was that of the first miraculous 
draught of fishes and the call of the fisherman, already 
fully considered. But his resolute attention to men’s 
temporal interests was characteristic of his entire min- 
istry. Not only by his miracles of wholesale healing 
and feeding did he show this, but in numerous indi- 
vidual ministries as well. _ 

With the sinful woman of Samaria who had come 


1 Chapter IV, pages 75-78, of this volume. 


Luke- 
5: I-18 


John 
4: 5-26 


John 
3: 1-21 


John 
§: 2-14 


John 
"3 25-35 


174 Taking Men Alive 


to draw water from the well of Jacob, he commenced 
with a request for a drink of water, and from that 
starting point of her interest he led her lovingly, skil- 
fully, without any direct condemnation of her great sin, 
to the point where she was ready to confess her sin, 
to believe in his declaration of Messiahship, and to 
bring a whole city under his influence. 

With Nicodemus, a trained and scholarly Pharisee 
whose chief interest was the rabbinical study of the 
Kingdom of God, and the Jews’ place in that Kingdom, 
Jesus needed to use no indirect means at all, but, 
seizing at once upon that which interested Nicodemus 
most, he revealed to him his own. _ignorance of the 
Kingdom, and his need of that which Christ alone could 
offer. The power of conviction rather than argu- 
ment comes out in verse 11: “ we speak that which 
we know, and bear witness of that which we have 
seen,” 

The absorbing interest of the man helpless for 
thirty-eight years was his physical need; with that 
interest the Great Physician began, and led from it toa 
spiritual, life-bringing word. 

With the multitude that had been miraculously fed, 
Jesus went at once to the shallow bottom of their in- 
terest,—more bread,—and held them absorbed until 
he could tell them of the true bread out of heaven, 
and to their cry, “ Lord, evermore give us this bread,” 
could answer with the Good News: “I am the bread 
of life: he that cometh to me shall not hunger, and 
he that believeth on me shall never thirst.” 

When Jesus went to Jerusalem to attend the Feast 
of Tabernacles, and wanted to let his mission be 
known there at the center of Judaism, he worked in 


How Our Lord Worked 175 


accordance with this same principle. ‘‘ On each of its 
[the feast’s] seven days a procession following a priest 
wound down the side of the temple hill to the pool of 
Siloam, the priest bearing a golden vessel which was 
filled with water at the pool. It was borne back to 
the temple, and poured forth, while the joyous crowd 
chanted the ancient words, ‘With joy shall ye draw 
water from the wells of salvation.” Was it strange 
that the audience was held with a tremendous thrill 
when, “on the last day, the great day of the feast, 
Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let 
him come unto me and drink’’? 

Again, when he wanted to challenge the attention 
of the Jews, who, though under galling subjection to 
the earthly power of Rome, prided themselves on being 
intellectually and morally the freest people in the 
world, he proclaimed that if they would turn to him 
aid abide in him, they should be made free! 

When a heart-broken sister ran to meet him to tell 
him of her brother’s death, his first word to her was 
t remind her lovingly of the resurrection in which 
she believed. From that he could tell her in Whom 
was the hope of the resurrection for all, and it was 
not difficult to bring her to the confession: “thou art 
the Christ, the Son of God.” 

Always did Jesus seem to connect himself inti- 
mately with the interest of the person whom he hoped 
to help. When one of his own disciples, to whom 
he promised that they should follow him where he was 
going, complained that they did not know the way, at 
once came the answer: “J am the way.” When that 
same disciple later showed that his chief interest was 
honest doubt over the resurrection story of the others, 


John 
7: 37, 38 


John 
8: 31-36 


ohn 
Il; 18-29 


14°: I-6; 
20 + 24-22 


Matt. 


Matt. 

& 3 20-24; 
12 : 24-37 
Mark 

foe Uses 
Matt. 
17: 19-21 
Mark 
16: 14 


176 Taking Men Alive 


Jesus unhesitatingly met the doubter just where he 
was, and dispelled the doubt. 

This principle of beginning with men’s temporal 
interests, which our Lord made so prominent in his 
own work, he laid upon his disciple-representatives as 
he sent them forth to work for him. They were to 
heal, cleanse, and bring to life, as part of their intro- 
duction to those whom they would reach for Christ. 


Commending, Rather than Condemning 


The other bait-principle that we have studied, the 
use of hearty commendation, is prominent in Christ’s 
earthly ministry. The surest way to drive men from 
us is to begin with condemnation or criticism. It is 
not reasonable to suppose that we can win men to our- 
selves or to Christ if we begin by telling them of 
their sins. Christ did not work that way. He never 
began his message to any individual or groups of per- 
sons by condemnation of.sin. He did not hesitate to 
denounce sin and sinful persons under certain circum- 
stances, as when his proffered salvation had been re- 
jected or was being actively opposed; or when religious 
leaders who posed as God’s representatives misrepre- 
sented God and attacked Jesus Christ as from the 
Devil; or when he was answering an attack of 
criticism by vigorous, unanswerable counter-criticism ; 
or when he chided his own disciples for certain failures 
after they had been won to him. But when Jesus set 
out to win a person to himself, it seemed_to be his 
resolute purpose to find something in that one which 
he could commend, and then to commend _ it in all 
heartiness. | 

For example, the men whom Jesus first invited to 


How Our Lord Worked 77, 


follow him undoubtedly had as glaring sins and as ob- 
vious defects as most of us have to-day. Those imper- 
fections must have been quite as much of a trial to 
Jesus as our fellows’ shortcomings are to us. But he 
did not commence by telling them of this, nor did he 
seek to help them at the outset by showing them what 
was wrong with them. Huis first recorded word to 
faulty Simon was, “ Thou art Simon the son of John: 
thou shalt be called oy ” as though to say, “ for you 
deserve a stalwart name.” So with another of the dis- 
ciples: there is no reason to suppose that Jesus could 
not have found, and did not see, any sin in Nathanael ; 
but instead of condemning that which was there, Jesus’ 
first word was in outspoken, hearty admiration of this 
man, in that he was particularly free from craftiness, 
or deceit. VT Fee, 

The Gospels do not record our Lord’s first words 
to each of the twelve, but it is reasonable to believe 
that this method of approach was his method with 
them all, not excepting Judas Iscariot. Even apocry- 
phal tradition preserves the deliberate intention of 
Christ to see the good in others, when it tells of a 
dead dog lying by the roadside, kicked aside and 
scorned by priest and Levite, until Jesus of Nazareth, 
passing by, looked at the little animal and said gently, 
“Fis teeth are very white.” 

We must learn to work in that way, if we would 
take men alive as Christ did. We shall never lose, 
but always gain, in our influence for Christ, if we 
determinedly seek that which can be commended in 
one whom we would win, and speak heartily of it. 

Christ’s singling out of Zacchzus, a man in whom 
there was evidently little that was likable, for the honor 


John 1:4: 


John 1:4; 


Luke 
19: I-10 


Mark 
12 : 28-34 


Matt. 
3: 5-13; 
9 : 20-22; 
9: 27-29; 
I5 : 21-28 

Mark 
10 : 46-52 

Luke 
7 : 30-50; 
17: 11-19 


178 Taking Men Alive 


of a visit, with the confidence in the man’s best side 
which that implied; the entire absence of any word of 
criticism by Christ of the much in the man’s life that 
was open to criticism; the triumphant outburst of the 
man’s higher nature as the result of this unexpected 
kind of treatment ; and our Lord’s hearty word of com- 
mendation closing the incident: could there be a 
plainer example of our Lord’s endorsement of this 
principle of approval and commendation in soul-win- 
ning ? 

That scribe to whom Jesus said, after they had 
talked together about love as better than burnt offer- 
ings, “ Thou art not far from the kingdom of God,” 
must have had a quickened sense of the power anc 
saving work of the young Teacher from Nazareth. 

Over and over again Jesus strengthened faith by 
recognizing or commending faith. The tiny, mustard 
seed grain of faith that was hardly alive had, in many 
a soul, its first sprouting toward vigorous life because 
of our Lord’s willingness to commend what others 
would have thought beneath commendation. Or again, 
when faith in him was already strong, he did not hesi- 
tate to render a tribute to its nobleness which must 
have led it on to still deeper possibilities. Study the 
cases of the centurion of Capernaum, the woman who 
touched Christ’s garment in the crowd, the two blind 
men, the Canaanitish (Syro-Phcenician) woman, Bar- 
timeus the blind beggar, the sinful woman at the 
house of Simon the Pharisee, the grateful leper of 
the border of Samaria. 

Christ’s instructions to his disciples, both the 
Twelve and the Seventy, were plain here also. They 
were to enter upon a mission primarily of winning 


How Our Lord Worked 179 


men, not of condemning or denouncing. Their first 
word to any house into which they might enter was 
to be a salutation of peace. Only after they should 
be met by actual opposition were they to utter any 
word of disapproval. 


Other Principles of Our Lord’s Work 


Jesus sought to find points of agreement with those 
whom he would win,—therefore a fundamental prin- 
ciple in this work. To those to whom the law and the 
prophets were vital matters of religion and conduct 
he said, “ Think not that I came to destroy the law or 
the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.” 
And he enlarged upon this until there was no room 
for any honest doubt of his meaning. 

He led his followers to think most about what 
they believed, not what they were in doubt about,— 
another cardinal principle of success in soul-winning. 

He refused to offer “proof” to those who, he 
knew, had no honest desire for proof nor any wish 
to believe in him or to ascertain the truth. Yet he 
was ready to furnish proof to one who wanted to 
believe. 

As for the place of Scripture-quoting in soul- 
winning, we shall find, as we review these instances of 
our Lord’s work, that the principle considered in 
Chapter VI would seem to have Christ’s endorsement. 
If the Scriptures were prominent in the interest of 
those whom he addressed, he recognized that interest 
by quoting Scripture. But if some other interest was 
more pfominent in the immediate life of the one with 
whom he dealt, that other interest was given prior 
place at the outset. 


Matt. 
10: 11-16 
Luke 
10: 3-11 


Matt. 
5: 17-19 


Matt. 
16 : 13-20 
John 
9 + 35-385 
Il: 25-27 


Matt. 

12 : 38, 39 
16: 1-4 
John 

20 : 25-27 


180 Taking Men Alive 


Always his enduring purpose seemed to be to con- 
vince men and women that they were dear to Him and 
to the Father just as they stood: faulty, sinning, un- 
worthy, discouraged or hopeful, it mattered not if 
they would but let Him come close alongside. 


Topics and Questions for Study and Discussion 


(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 


1. What is the difference between doing Christ’s work, and 
doing work for Christ? 

2. Mention your reasons for believing that our Lord gave 
preferred place to individual soul-winning in his own 
work, and that he would have us do so to-day. 

3. Quote passages to show that Jesus came to point out 
the way of life, rather to condemn unto death. 

4. What two kinds of bait, in the winning of men to him- 
self, were prominent in Jesus’ work? 

5. Cite instances of Jesus’ use of men’s present interests 
as bait. 

6. What reason have we to believe that he specifically in- 
structed his disciples to use the bait of men’s present 
interests ? 

When did our Lord criticize and denounce? 

Cite instances of his use of commendation as bait. 

g. Cite instances of his use of commendation in building 

character or strengthening faith. 

10. What shows that Christ’s disciples were instructed to 
win at the start rather than to denounce? 

11. Mention other principles of our Lord’s work which should 
be controlling principles of our own. 

12, Find your own illustrations of our Lord’s use, or non- 
use, of Scripture passages, and ascertain whether the 
principle formulated in Chapter VI would seem to 
have the approval of his example. 

13. State the enduring purpose of Jesus’ life-time ministry. 


QO'N 


THE PRINCIPLES REVIEWED 


PREPARATORY THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS 


(For study before reading this chapter) 


What principles of successful soul-winning stand 
out most clearly in your mind, as the result 
of these studies? 

What would you say are likely to be one’s great- 
est encouragements in the work? 

What are the chief incentives to doing the work? 

What are the chief difficulties in the work? 

Why may we properly call the work of indi- 
vidual soul-winning an art? 

To what facts and factors do you attribute the 
superior effectiveness of individual work? 


Xx 


THE PRINCIPLES REVIEWED 


Le we do not learn and practise the art of taking men 

alive, we shall be failures in the chief work of 
Christ’s Kingdom on earth. In entering upon the 
work, we recognize three distinctive truths: 

1. The work of individual soul-winning is the 
greatest work that God permits men to do. 

2. It was Christ’s own preferred method of work, 
as it is his preferred method for us to-day. For it 
is always the most effective way of working. 

3. It is the hardest work in the world to do, and 
it always will be the hardest. 

But it is an art of well-defined and plainly-recog- 
nizable principles, which any one may learn who is 
willing to pay the price in study and practise, and in 
which laymen and ministers are on an equal footing. 
There is no professional point of vantage here. 


That individual soul-winning is the greatest work 


is part of the paradox-principle of the Way of Life. 
One is more than many. The least is the greatest. 


The three 


_ points 


_ proved 


You cannot reach a thousand unless you can reach | 
one. The greatest preaching is the preaching to an in- | 
dividual. The greatest preachers, pastors, evangelists, ° 


and missionaries agree as to this. General preaching 
is preliminary or preparatory to this end and climax 
of effort, individual work for individuals. 

183 


What 
the work 
demands 


184 Taking Men Alive 


That it was Christ’s preferred method in his earthly 
ministry is seen from a study of the Gospels and an 
examination of the relative results of his individual 
and his general work. Seven of the eleven faithful 
apostles were so won; so also was the last of the 
apostles, Paul. That it is Christ’s preferred method 
for us to-day is seen from the easily proved superior 
effectiveness of the method in every branch of religi- 
ous and secular: life. 

That it is the hardest work, is inevitable. Because 
it is the most effective sort of warfare against the 
Devil, it is the kind of effort which the Devil most 
bitterly opposes, seeking always to persuade us away 
from it by the subtle, poisonous suggestion that we 
may harm the cause of Christ if we attempt it just 
now. For this reason it will never grow easy. Nor 
ought it to; its costliness is a secret of its efféctive- 
ness, and when it is easily done there is grave question 
whether it is effectively done. 

The obligation to do this work rests with equal 
weight upon every confessed follower of Christ. Fail- 
ure here is open disloyalty to the Commission. 

Individual work is simply a telling others of our 
experience of Christ’s love, so that they may share it. 
Efficiency in this does not demand an expert knowl- 
edge of the Bible or of theology, nor skill and power 
in argument and discussion. It does call for unshaken 
knowledge of what Jesus Christ has done for us, and 
a deeply-rooted purpose to share that knowledge with 
others. We must know Christ, and we must know the 
one to whom we would make Christ attractive. 

The best way to begin in this work is to begin; 
the best time to begin is now. The only mistake we 


The Principles Reviewed 185 


need really to fear is the mistake of holding off. There 
are few errors to dread im the work; the great error 
is the error of keeping out of the work. 

Our feelings must not be recognized as factors at 
all. Their presence or absence is to be brushed aside, 
ignored. Feeling like it is not the secret of success in 
this work; will-power, resolute intention persistently 
carried out, is the secret. We must and we may love 
those whom we do not like. 

Our own personal shortcomings must not deter us. 
What Christ is, not what we are, is our message. We 
speak as saved sinners, not as superior beings. Yet 
the doing of this work is bound to have a powerfully 
uplifting influence upon the personal life and char- 
acter of those who engage in it. 

A life-resolve that every Christian worker ought 
to consider is the following: “ Whenever I am in such 
intimacy with a soul as to be justified in choosing my 
subject of conversation, the theme of themes shall 
have prominence between us, so that I may learn his 
need, and, if possible, meet it.” Notice that this basis 
for one’s efforts shuts out indiscriminate, haphazard 
efforts, such as approaching utter strangers with an 
ynquiry concerning their souls; conforms to the usual 
and proper courtesies and conventionalities of life; re- 
spects a man’s individuality ; but recognizes the theme 
of themes as worthy of a place in any conversation 
which one has the right to direct. 

As we are face to face with an opportunity, our 
whole attention should be centered upon the person 
whom we would win,—nothing else. We must seek 
to know him in order to know his interests; having 
learned what his interests are, we must begin by work- 


Unimpor 
tance of 
our feel- 
ings and 
short- 

comings 


The life- 
resolve 


Two 
baits : 
present 
interests 
honest 
commen, 
dation 


Seeking 
common 
interests 


186 Takmg Men Alive 


ing with them just as they are, not as we think they 
ought to be. This is the secret of tact: a touch in 
keeping with, rather than apart from, our man’s pres- 
ent interests. That which we put forward, in line 
with his present interests, to catch his attention and 
win him to us, is bait. Bait is a prime essential in 
winning men to us. The first miraculous draught of 
fishes is one of the striking instances of our Lord’s 
use of this kind of bait in winning men to him. 

Another effective kind of bait, always available, 
is honest commendation. One reason for its effective- 
ness is its rarity. Criticism and denunciation, no mat- 
ter how glaring the other’s shortcomings may be, have 
no place in soul-winning. Denunciation does not win, 
it antagonizes. Our business as soul-winners is to 
draw men to us, not to drive them away. Genuine, 
outspoken commendation always wins. 

Salvation may sometimes be made attractive to men 
by showing that it is just as important in this world 
as in the next,—indeed, that its chief value to human 
beings while they are human is its present value. This 
will be a new thought to many who have had mis- 
taken, stereotyped ideas of Christian truth. But it is 
in line with their present interests, which are the only 
interests we have to work with. 

It is important to make the way of salvation simple. © 
“Faith is that act by which one person, a sinner, 
commits himself to another person, a Saviour.” 

It is often costly work to seek and find and become 
deeply interested in another man’s interests; but it is 
always possible to do this. The question is not, “ Am 
I naturally interested in this one and his interests?” 
but, “ Am I willing to get interested?” We can always 


The Principles Reviewed 187 


get interested if we are willing to pay the price in time 
and effort. And the deliberate cultivating of another’s 
interests is sure to break down opposition and win 
thiat one if persisted in. 

Differences of denominational or other religious be- 
lief are never sufficient to keep two men from finding 
common ground, if only one of the two is determined 
that they shall. There are certain fundamental agree- 
ments of belief which can always be found to build 
upon if one resolutely seeks points of agreement rather 
than of difference. 

We may properly identify ourselves with any in- 
terest of another’s provided the doing so does not de- 
mand a lowering of one’s own standards of right and 
duty. We must often go “ far afield” ; we need never 
“let down.” 

Only Christ can safely settle questions of duty 
for men. One man can never settle them for another, 
and ought not to attempt it. Therefore discussions 
as to details of one’s personal life or duty are to be 
resolutely barred out of our conversation in individual 
soul-winning. Failure to hold to this principle may 
defeat our most earnest attempts to reach others. It 
is our duty simply to lead men to the Saviour who 
will be their Guide, and insist that they let Him alone 
tell them their further duty. “If one is right at the 
center, he is likely to get right at the circumference.” 

Conviction as to the truth and the joy of our mes- 
sage—a conviction that only our own personal ex- 
perience can give—is our greatest strength in this 
work. It is to take the place of all argument and dis- 
cussion, for it is all-powerful while they are worse 
than weak. Men are never argued into the Kingdom 


Convic- 
tion, noi 
discus- 
sion or 
argumer 


Place of 
the Bible 


188 Taking Men Alive 


of Heaven; they are often estranged from God and 
man by argument. But men are constantly won over 
to belief in, and loyalty to, the Saviour, by the mag- 
netism of the irresistible conviction of a man whose 
belief is beyond and above and better than argument. 
Our conviction may safely be twofold: conviction, of 
course, that what we believe is true; and conviction 
that the man whom we are trying to win knows it 1s 
true, no matter what he professes. For every man is 
made in God’s image. 

Because the great majority of persons who need te 
be brought to Christ are not specially interested in the 
Bible, therefore Bible verses are not likely to be the 
best bait, at the outset, for winning souls. The Bible 
does not, as a rule, offer common meeting-ground to 
begin with. A Bible text is not attractive to most 
of those who need our help. The fact that it ought 
to be has nothing to do with the case. We must work 
with men as they are, not as they ought to be. 

But the Bible is the soul-winner’s indispensable 
equipment, even though it is not necessarily his tool. 
It is a Bible message that we bring, Bible truth that 
we present, though we shall often find it well to put 
it into the familiar terms of the everyday life of the 
one whom we would reach. We must, ourselves, 
know the Bible through and through. It is the Guide 
Book to the Way of Life. If, in some exceptional 
case, one who has not found Christ as Saviour is deeply 
interested in the Bible, then of course the Scriptures 
may furnish the very best meeting-ground in the 
world. But such instances are rare. As a rule, the 
Bible is to be a goal rather than the beginning of 
our effort with the unsaved. We must begin with 


The Principles Reviewed 189 


their present interests; we must not rest until we 
“ave brought them to such recognition of the Book as 
shall give it unique place in their lives. 

The encouragements in the work are greater than 
the difficulties. We have only the Devil working 
against us; we have God working with us. A fre- 
quent surprise is the finding that God has specially 
prepared the way, and that some one whom we ap- 
proached with reluctance has been longing to be 
spoken to. Special difficulties are largely in our own 
timorous, Devil-aided imaginations. Rebuffs by those 
whom we would win are almost unknown. 

The mentally deficient are as much entitled to the 
gospel message as those who have greater temporal 
privileges than they, and they are surprisingly ready 
and competent to grasp the message and to act upon it. 
Surprises are in store for those who, slow to believe 
this, will nevertheless put it to the test. Let us never 
cheat a childish, helpless soul of the message which 
God entrusts to us for that one, and which may bring 
into that life the only sunshine it has ever known. 

No opportunity is so slight or trifling that it can 
safely be passed by. The “trifles” in this work, re- 
jected of men, may become cornerstones in life-build- 
ings planned by the Master-Builder. If we admit, of 
any opportunity, that it is too trifling to use, we are 
sure to lose priceless opportunities. We are especially 
in danger of missing the opportunities that are close 
at hand,—the commanplace, everyday openings; and 
in so doing to overlook the souls nearest to us who 
need our help. Opportunity cannot be measured by 
man-made rules. ‘It may be a small matter for you 
to speak the one word for Christ that wins a needy 


Encour- 
agements 
ever- 
present 


The 
mentally 
deficient 


No op- 
portunity 
trifling 


Our 
duty for 
results 


Our 
Lord’s 
nduring 
purpose 


190 Taking Men Alive 


soul—a small matter to you, but it is everything to 
him.” 

A chief incentive to the persistent doing of this 
work is the fact that absolutely no other form of effort 
takes its place. Faithfulness in pulpit or Sunday-~ 
school or prayer-meeting is a good accompaniment of 
it, but never a substitute for it. 

Seeing results in the work may or may not be our 
privilege. It is our duty to work for results just as 
long as the result does not appear and the person 
sought is within our sphere of influence. At times 
it is an evident duty to urge an immediate decision. 
Always we ought to make it plain that Jesus Christ 
accepts at once,—that if there is any delay it is not 
of his causing. Follow-up work is peculiarly im- 
portant. It may be supremely important; without it, 
all our preliminary effort may count for nothing. 

A study of our Lord’s ministry on earth shows that 
the principles here reviewed have the approval of his 
practise and his teachings. The enduring purpose of 
Jesus as a man must be our enduring purpose in this 
work: to get close alongside of men, just as they are, in 
order to show them that they are dear to us and to our 
Saviour who would be theirs. 


Topics and Questions for Study and Discussion 


(To test one’s grasp of the contents of the chapter) 


1. Mention three distinctive points that characterize indi-~ 
vidual soul-winning. 

2. Briefly summarize the proof of each of those three points, 

3. Upon what does efficiency in the work primarily depend? 

4. What place should our feelings and our shortcomings 
have in this work? Why? 


The Principles Reviewed 191 


What do you see in favor of the making of the life- 
resolve that H. Clay Trumbull made? 

Upon what should our attention be focused as we pre- 
pare to use an opportunity in individual soul-winning? 

What two effective kinds of bait for taking men alive 
can you mention? 

How far may we properly go in identifying ourselves 
with another’s interests for the purpose of winning 
him to Christ? 

What is the best way to help a man to settle questions 
of the details of his personal life and duty? 

Why are argument and discussion to be barred out of 
this work? 

What twofold conviction have we the right to in this 
work? 

What place has the Bible in individual soul-winning? 
Give your reasons fully. 

Why are the encouragements of the soul-winner greater 
than his difficulties? 

How do you account for the fact that the mentally de- 
ficient are so ready to grasp the truth of salvation? 

What is the danger in attempting to discriminate betweer 
opportunities in this work? 

What should be our attitude toward results? 

What was the enduring purpose of Jesus as a man? 


The author will be grateful to readers of 
this volume who will write him at any time 
(addressing him at “ The Sunday School Times, 
Philadelphia’’) concerning thetr experiences tn 
the field of individual soul-winning, as tllus- 
trating any of the principles here presented, or 
other principles, or tn comment upon such ques- 
tions as the following: page 47, Questions 9, 
II, 12; page 61, Question 8; page &8, Ques- 
tions 6,8; page 140, Questions I, 4. 


> 2* oe 








INDEXES 








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TOPRIGAIZ IN Dies 


AGNOSTIC, winning an, 103. 
Agreement with others, 
points of, 179. 
Andrew on Lincoln, Governor, 129. 
Andrew won by individual work, 


finding 


36. 
Antagonism, disarming, 95-98. 
Apocryphal story of Christ and 

dead dog, 177. 

Apostles, seven of the eleven in- 

dividually won, 36, 171. 
Approach in soul-winning, Christ’s, 

177. 

Argument, conviction better than, 


125 ff. 

Army Bible, H. Clay Trumbull’s, 
113. 

Army transport, individual work 
on, 84 ff. 

Atonement of Christ, meeting 
doubt as to the, 117 ff 

Author’s request of readers, 191. 


Bascocx, Maltbie D., 
work of, 34-36. 

Backslider, winning a, 134-137. 

Bait in individual work, 74 ff. 

Bartimeus, Christ and, 178. 

Beecher, Henry Ward, on individ- 
ual work, 33. 

Beliefs, not doubts, thinking most 
about, 179. 

Bible in individual work, use of, 
109 ff.; not usually attractive 
bait, 4111; the soul-winner’s 
equipment, not necessarily his 
tool, 111; unsaved persons not 
often interested in, IIT} 
Christ’s use of, 111; what if 
used with profane sea-captain, 
112; what if used with whis- 
key-drinker, 112; when com- 
mon meeting-ground, 115-121. 

Body, reaching soul through, 107. 

Bossuet on individual work, 43. 

Blind beggar, Christ and, 178. 

Blind men, Christ and, 178. 

Boarding-house incident, New Eng- 
land, 141 ff. 

Border-line questions of duty, how 
to settle, 126, 127. 


individual 


Bread of Life, Christ the, 174. 

Bait, Christ’s use of, 173 ff. 

Bushnell’s definition of faith, 94; 
on refusal to discuss details, 


128. 
Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip, 


10. 
Browne of Harpoot College, Presi- 
dent, 150. 


CasmMan, Bishop McCabe and the, 
753, 

Cambridge student at Northfield, 
53, 54- 

Canaanitish woman, Christ 
178. 

Card-playing, settling the question 
of, 126 ff. 

Catholic, working with a Roman, 
98-101. 

Centurion of Capernaum, Christ 
and, 178. 

College, individual work in, 39. 

Commendation as bait in soul-win- 
ning, 79; always possible, 79, 
80; Christ’s use of, 176 ff. 

Conducting the class-session, 23. 

Confident, our right to be, 60. 

Conviction better than discussion 
or argument, 125 ff. 

Creed, ignoring differences of, 98- 


and, 


IOI. 
Christ, individual work his pre- 
ferred method, 36 ff., 3, 171; 
172; his use of Scripture, 111; 
his work, not our duty to do, 
171; his mission winning, not 
epposing, 172, 173; and lame 
man, 174; and Nicodemus, 
174; and paralytic, 174; and 
woman of Samaria, 173, 1743 
at the Feast of Tabernacles, 
174; miraculously feeding the 
multitude, 174; and Lazarus’ 
sister, 175; and Martha, 1753 
offering freedom to the Jews, 
175; and doubters, 175, 176; 
his use of criticism, 176; his 
use of commendation, 176 ff.; 
his use of denunciation, 1763 
and Bartimzus, the blind beg- 


195 


196 


gar, 178; and blind men, 178; 
and Canaanitish woman, 178; 
and centurion of Capernaum, 
178; his commendation of the 
Scribe, 178; and leper of bor- 
der of Samaria, 178; and sin- 
ful woman at house of Simon 
the Pharisee, 178; and Syro- 
phenician woman, 178; and 
the woman in the crowd, 178; 
emphasizing belief, not doubt, 
179; offering proof, 179; seeking 
points of agreement, 179; his 
use of Scripture-quoting, 179; 
withholding proof, 179; his en- 
during purpose, 180. 

Criticism, Christ’s use of, 176; has 
it any place in soul-winning? 83. 


“DANGERS of Personal Evangel- 
ism;’? why not accepted, 55. 
Decision? shall we expect immedi- 

ate, 160 ff. 
Defects? what place have our, 57; 
overlooking others’, 176 ff. 
Deity of Christ, meeting doubt as 
to the, 116 ff. 

Denouncing others’ faults; is it 
ever justifiable? 83. 

Denunciation, Christ’s use of, 176. 

Difficulty of individual work, 42-46. 

Differences of creed, ignoring, 98- 
IOI. 

Dune seven of the twelve in- 
ividually won, 36, 75 ff., 171; 
instructed primarily to win, 
not condemn or denounce, 178, 
179. 

Discussion, conviction better than, 
P25 0dr. 

Dog, apocryphal story of Christ 
and dead, 177. 
Doubts and Doubters,” 
Deal with, 12. 

Doubters, Christ and, 175, 176. 
Draught of fishes, miraculous, 76- 


“How to 


78, 
YE sooth De settling the question of, 


T2001t: 

Duty, not a duty to settle others’, 
125-128. 

Drummond’s incident of individual 
work, 165 ff 

Duryea’s comment on _ individual 


work, 32. 

Easy? will individual work grow, 
43. 

Edinburgh University student, in- 


cident of, 165, 166. 
age Peee  ge in the work, 141 


Fartu defined by Bushnell, 94. 
Feast of Tabernacles, Christ at the, 


174. 
Feelings? what place have our, 57° 


Topical Index 


Finney, evangelistic meetings of, 
iS. 

Fisherman’s characteristics in soul- 

| winning; 53. e 

Fishers of men, disciples made, 76- 


78. 

sHishin’ jimmy ee tons. 

Follow-up work, vital importance 
of, 165; Drummond’s incident 
of, 165, 166; striking incident 
of, 167. 

Freedom to the Jews, Christ offer- 
ing, 175. 


Sire rationalist, winning a, 116 


Gough, Johnie Beers 
Greatest work, individual work the, 


31. 

Grenfell on reaching souls through 
bodies, 106, 107. 

Guile in individual work, 95. 


Hackman, Bishop McCabe and the, 


a Se pte ts 
Hadley, S) “Hie 

Street,” 59. 
Half-witted, winning the, 145 ff. 
Hardest work, individual work the, 


“Down in Water 


42. 

Harpoot College, President Browne 
OfsS 0: 

Horse, story of finding lost, ror. 


IMMEDIATE decision? shall we ex- 


pect, 160 ff 

Imperfections, overlooking others’, 
170M ite 

Incarnation, meeting doubt as to 


the)on17 i: 
Incentives to the work, 141 ff. 
“Individual Work for Individuals,’ 
purpose of the book, 11. 
Individual work, Christ’s preferred 
method, 36 ff., 171, 172; what 
it is, 51; interests as bait, the 
other man’s, 75 ff.; how far 
afield may we go in, 105, 1063; 
hrist’s use of, 173 
“Interruption” in class work, no 
such thing as, 24. 


Lae wrestling match at, 136. 

Jacob at Jabbok, 136. 

Jacob’s well, Christ at, 173, 174. 

James won by individual work, 36. 

Janitor in theological seminary, 
winning a, 155. 

John won by individual work, 36. 

Judas Iscariot, 177. 


LaME man, Christ and, 174. 

Lazarus’ sister, Christ and, 175. | 

Leper of border of Samaria, Christ 
and, 178. 

Life-resolve in individual work, 69, 

Listening important, good, 85. 


Topical Index 


Lincoln, Governor Andrew on, 129. 
Lino, winning, 145-148. 


McAuwtey, Jerry, 59. 

McCabe, Bishop C. C., 153. 
Martha, Christ and, 175. 

Matthew won by individual work, 


36. 

Mentally deficient, winning the, 
Tawi tis 

Miraculous draught of fishes, 76- 


78. 

Mistakes in the work shall we fear? 
what, 55. 

Moody on individual work, 33. 

Multitude, Christ miraculously feed- 
ing the, 174. 


NATHANAEL won by _ individual 
work, 36; Christ’s commenda- 
patonal, One MG Aye 

Nevius on individual work, 33. 

Nicodemus, Christ and, 174. 

Northfield, experience at, 53, 54. 


Oxp colored man, commending an, 


79. 
Original work by students, impor- 
tance Of; 2400 
Other man is, getting where the, 


IOI. 

Others’ duty, not a duty to settle, 
125-128. 

Oyster supper in individual work, 
103-105. 


Paratytic, Christ and, 174. 

Paradox in the “Way of Life,” 32. 

Paul’s permanent principle in evan- 
gelistic work, 95. 

Pearce, W. C., 154. 

Pentecost, George F., 
of, 115-120. 

Peter won by individual work, 36. 

Philip won by individual work, 36. 

“Pioneer corps’ sergeant won by 
individual work, 156, 157. 

Politics, individual work in, 4o. 

Porter, winning a Pullman-car, 
154-155. ae 

Prayer-meeting, bringing persons 
to, by individual work, 158. 

Preaching only preliminary in soul- 
winning, 33. 

Prepared for us, the way, 141 ff. 

Principles of individual work re- 
viewed, 183 

Profane sea-captain, praising a, 83 
ff.; what if Bible verses used 
with, 112. 

Proof, when Christ 
withheld, 179. 

Pullman-car porter, winning a, 154, 
155. 


RATIONALIST, winning a, 116 ff. 
Rebuffs almost unknown, 144, 145. 


experience 


offered or 


197 


Reflex influence of individual work, 


59. 2 

Refusing to argue, duty of, 130 ff. 

“Religious” and ‘‘secular’’ con- 
thastedsetO 7. 

Request of readers, author’s, 191. 

Resurrection of Christ, meeting 
doubt as to the, 117 ff. 

Review of principles of individual 
work, 183 ff 

Revival meetings versus individual 
wotk, 36 ff. 

Roman Catholic, working with a, 
g8-Iol. 


SALVATION? what is, 91-93; of pres. 
ent interest, 93: 
Samaria, woman of, 
173, 174. 
Saved? what is it to be, 91-93. 
Scientific agnostic, winning an, 103. 
Scribe commended by Christ, 178. 
Scripture, Christ’s use of, 111, 179. 
Sea-captain, winning a, 83-88; what 
if Bible verses used with, 112. 
“Secular” and “religious” con- 
trasted, 107. 

Sessions, how many class? 2s. 
Seven of the twelve disciples in- 
dividually won, 36, 171. 
Sharp-shooters versus artillery, 37. 
sarees overlooking others’, 

17 ; 
Simon, Christ’s commendation of, 


Christ and, 


177. 

Simon the Pharisee, Christ and 
_ sinful woman at house of, 178. 

pian is any opportunity too, 150 


Slosson, Annie Trumbull, 12. 

Smoking, settling the question of, 
1200 tte 

Soul-winning between class-sessions, 
actual, 22. 

Soul through body, reaching, 107. 

Spurgeon to young minister, 60. 

Studd at Northfield, 53. 

Students to work, getting the, 20. 

Steeple-top, minister who went to 
thew tOl. 102. 

Stratton, Joel, 153. 

Street-corner, winning a man on 
the, 151. 

Sub-standard, winning the, 145 ff. 

Substitute for individual work, no, 


ESGais 
Sunday-school, individual work in 


the, 38, 39. 
Syro-pheenician women, Christ and, 
178, 
TABERNACLES, Christ at the Feast 


OLsNr74: 
Tact? what is, 74. 
“Take alive,’? Greek for, 29. 
Theater-going, settling the question 
Ol, 0120 


198 


Theological seminar>. winning a 
janitor in, 155. 

Time shall we spend in winning 
one soul? how much, 106. 


Touch-and-go plan, uselessness of, 


106. 

Trumbull, C. G., won by individual 
appeal, 41, 42. 

Trumbull, He Clay, death of, “9% 
individual work always hard 
to, 44, 45; won by individual 


appeal, 65-67; first individual 
work of, 67, 68; life resolve 
of, 68, 69; his Bible study, 


113; his practise in quoting 


Scripture, 113-115. 


UNSAVED persons not often inter- 
ested in the Bible, 111. 


WHISKEY-DRINKER, commending a, 
80-83; what if Bible verses 
used with, 112. 


Topical Index 


Williams, Sir George, tact of, 103- 
105; never rebuffed, 145. 
Winning, not antagonizing, our 

mission, 74 ff.; Christ’s mis- 
sion, 172, 1733 not condemning 
or denouncing, the disciples’ 
primary mission, 178, 179. 
Woman in the crowd, Christ and 


the, 178. 
Woman of Samaria, Christ and, 
reo ie» 


Wrestling match at Jabbok, 136. 


Younc Men’s Christian Associa- 
tion, good work of, 82; tact 
of founder of, 103-105; found- 
er of never rebuffed, 145. 


ZaccHAEus, found present salva- 
tion, 93; Christ’s winning of, 


177; 


IY 
Zogreo, Greek for “take alive,”’ 29. 


SCRIPTURE INDEX 





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